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33p % B» Larue* 



BOOKS, CULTURE AND CHARACTER. i6mo, #1.00, 
net. Postage extra. 

A PRIMER OF RIGHT AND WRONG. i6mo, 70 cents, 
net. Postpaid, 77 cents. 

A MULTITUDE OF COUNSELLORS. Being a Col- 
lection of Codes, Precepts, and Rules of Life, from the 
Wise of all Ages. Crown 8vo, $2.00. Postpaid, $2.19. 

A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES FOR SEC- 
ONDARY SCHOOLS. With Maps. Crown 8vo, half 
leather, $1.40, net; postpaid. 

A HISTORY OF ENGLAND FOR THE USE OF 
SCHOOLS AND ACADEMIES. With Topical Ana- 
lyses, Research Questions, and Bibliographical Notes. 
With 18 Maps and 150 Illustrations. Crown 8vo, half 
leather, $1.25, net; postpaid. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



BOOKS, CULTURE AND 
CHARACTER 



BOOKS, CULTURE 
AND CHARACTER 

BY 

J. N. LARNED 

Author of "A Primer of Right and Wrong," 

ETC. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY 

1906 



LIBRARY Of CONGRESS 

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SEP 27 »90« 

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COPYRIGHT I906 BY J. N. LARKED 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published October igob 



CONTENTS 

I. A FAMILIAR TALK ABOUT BOOKS . „ I 

II. THE TEST OF QUALITY IN BOOKS . . 39 

III. HINTS AS TO READING 49 

IV. THE MISSION AND THE MISSIONARIES 

OF THE BOOK . 73 

V. GOOD AND EVIL FROM THE PRINTING 

PRESS 115 

VI. PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND PUBLIC EDU- 
CATION 135 

VII. SCHOOL-READING VERSUS SCHOOL- 
TEACHING OF HISTORY . . . .159 



I 

A FAMILIAR TALK ABOUT 
BOOKS 



A FAMILIAR TALK ABOUT 
BOOKS 1 

I WAS asked to say something to you 
about books ; but when I began to col- 
lect my thoughts it seemed to me that 
the subject on which I really wished to 
speak is not well denned by the word 
Books. 

If you had been invited to listen to a 
discourse on baskets, you would natu- 
rally ask, " Baskets of what? " The bas- 
ket, in itself, would seem to be a topic so 
insignificant that you might reasonably 
object to the wasting of time on it. It is 
a thing which has no worth of its own, 
but borrows all its useful value from the 
things which are put into it. It belongs 

1 Addressed originally to the students of the 
Central High School, Buffalo, N. Y. 



4 A FAMILIAR TALK 

to a large class of what may be called the 
conjunctive utensils of mankind — the 
vessels and vehicles which are good for 
nothing but to hold together and to carry 
whatever it may be that men need to con- 
vey from one to another or from place to 
place. 

Now, books are utensils of that class 
quite as distinctly as baskets are. In 
themselves, as mere fabrications of paper 
and ink, they are as worthless as empty 
wickerware. They differ from one an- 
other in value and in interest precisely as 
a basket of fruit differs from a basket of 
coals, or a basket of garbage from a bas- 
ket of flowers, — which is the difference 
of their contents, and that only. 

So it is not, in reality, of books that 
I wish to speak, but of the contents of 
books. It may be well for us to think of 
books in that way, as vessels — vehicles 
— carriers — because it leads us, I am 
sure, to more clearly classified ideas of 
them. It puts them all into one category, 



ABOUT BOOKS 5 

to begin with, as carriers in the com- 
merce of mind with mind ; which instantly 
suggests that there are divisions of 
kind in that commerce, very much as 
there are divisions of kind in the mer- 
cantile traffic of the world ; and we pro- 
ceed naturally to some proper assort- 
ing of the mind-matter which books are 
carriers for. The division we are likely 
to recognize first is one that separates all 
which we commonly describe to ourselves 
as Knowledge, from everything which 
mind can exchange with mind that is 
not knowledge, in the usual sense, but 
rather some state of feeling. Then we see 
very quickly that, while knowledge is of 
many kinds, it is divisible as a whole into 
two great, widely different species, the 
line between which is an interesting one 
to notice. One of those species we may 
call the knowledge of what has been, and 
the other we will describe as the know- 
ledge of what is. The first is knowledge 
of the past ; the second is knowledge of 



6 A FAMILIAR TALK 

the present. The first is History ; the 
second is (using the word in a large 
sense ) Science. We are not straining the 
term Science if we make it cover every- 
thing, in philosophy, politics, economics, 
arts, that is not historical ; and we shall 
not be straining the term Poetry if we use 
that to represent everything which we 
have left out of the category of positive 
knowledge, being everything that be- 
longs to imagination and emotion. 

In History, Science, Poetry, then, we 
name the most obvious assorting of the 
matter known as Literature, of which 
books are the necessary carriers. But 
there is another classification of it, not 
often considered, which is a more impor- 
tant one, in my view, and which exhibits 
the function of books much more impres- 
sively. Draw one broad line through 
everything that mind can receive from 
mind, — everything, — memory, thought, 
imagination, suggestion, — and put on 
one side of it all that has come from the 



ABOUT BOOKS 7 

past, against everything, on the other 
side, that comes from the present, and 
then meditate a little on what it signifies ! 
In our first classification we considered 
the past only with reference to history, 
or knowledge of the past. Now, I wish 
to put with that all of our knowledge, of 
every kind, that has come to us out of the 
past ; and when you have reflected a 
moment you will see that that means al- 
most everything that we know. For all 
the knowledge now in the possession of 
mankind has been a slow accumulation, 
going on through not less than seventy 
centuries. Each succeeding generation 
has learned just a little that was new, to 
add to what it received from the genera- 
tions before, and has passed the inherit- 
ance on with a trivial increase. We are 
apt to look rather scornfully at any sci- 
ence which is dated before 1900. But 
where would our brand-new discoveries 
have been without the older ones which 
led up to them by painful steps ? In nine 



8 A FAMILIAR TALK 

cases out of ten it was an eye of genius 
that caught the early glimpses of things 
which dull eyes can see plainly enough 
now. 

Most of the science, then, which we 
value so in these days, has come to us, in 
the train of all history, out of the past ; 
and poetry, too, has come with it, and 
music, and the great laws of righteous- 
ness, without which we could be little bet- 
ter than the beasts. How vast an estate 
it is that we come into as the intellectual 
heirs of all the watchers and searchers and 
thinkers and singers of the generations 
that are dead ! What a heritage of stored 
wealth ! What perishing poverty of mind 
we should be left in without it ! 

Now, books are the carriers of all this 
accumulating heritage from generation 
to generation ; and that, I am sure you 
will agree with me, is their most impres- 
sive function. It will bear thinking of a 
little further. 

You and I, who live at this moment, 



ABOUT BOOKS 9 

stand islanded, so to speak, on a narrow 
strand between two great time-oceans, — 
the ocean of Time Past and the ocean of 
Time to Come. When we turn to one, 
looking future-ward, we see nothing — 
not even a ripple on the face of the silent, 
mysterious deep, which is veiled by an 
impenetrable mist. We turn backward 
to the other sea, looking out across the 
measureless expanse of Time Past, and, 
lo ! it is covered with ships. We see 
them rise from beyond the far horizon in 
fleets which swarm upon the scene, and 
they come sailing to us in numbers that 
are greater than we can count. They are 
freighted with the gifts of the dead, to us 
who are the children of the dead. They 
bring us the story of the forgotten life 
of mankind, its experience, its learning, 
its wisdom, its warnings, its counsels, its 
consolations, its songs, its discoveries of 
beauty and joy. What if there had been 
no ships to bring us these ? Think of it I 
What if the great ocean of Time Past 



io A FAMILIAR TALK 

rolled as blankly and blackly behind us 
as the ocean of Time to Come rolls before 
us ? What if there were no letters and 
no books ? For the ships in this picture 
are those carriers of the commodities of 
mind which we call Letters and Books. 

Think what your state would be in a 
situation like that ! Think what it would 
be to know nothing, for example, of the 
way in which American Independence 
was won, and the federal republic of the 
United States constructed ; nothing of 
Bunker Hill ; nothing of George Wash- 
ington, — except the little, half true and 
half mistaken, that your fathers could 
remember, of what their fathers had re- 
peated, of what their fathers had told to 
them ! Think what it would be to have 
nothing but shadowy traditions of the 
voyage of Columbus, of the coming of 
the Mayflower pilgrims, and of all the 
planting of life in the New World from 
Old World stocks, — like Greek legends 
of the Argonauts and of the Heraclidae ! 



ABOUT BOOKS n 

Think what it would be to know no more 
of the origins of the English people, their 
rise and their growth in greatness, than 
the Romans knew of their Latin begin- 
nings ; and to know no more of Rome 
herself than we might guess from the 
ruins she has left ! Think what it would 
be to have the whole story of Athens and 
Greece dropped out of our knowledge, 
and to be unaware that Marathon was 
ever fought, or that one like Socrates had 
ever lived ! Think what it would be to 
have no line from Homer, no thought 
from Plato, no message from Isaiah, no 
Sermon on the Mount, nor any parable 
from the lips of Jesus ! 

Can you imagine a world intellectually 
famine-smitten like that — a bookless 
world — and not shrink with horror from 
the thought of being condemned to it ? 

Yet, — and here is the grim fact which 
I am most anxious to impress on your 
thought, — the men and the women who 
take nothing from letters and books are 



12 A FAMILIAR TALK 

choosing to live as though mankind did 
actually wallow in the awful darkness of 
that state from which writing and books 
have rescued us. For them, it is as if no 
ship had ever come from the far shores 
of old Time where their ancestry dwelt ; 
and the interest of existence to them is 
huddled in the petty space of their own 
few years, between walls of mist which 
thicken as impenetrably behind them as 
before. How can life be worth living on 
such terms as that ? How can men or 
women be content with so little, when 
they might have so much ? 

I have dwelt long enough on the gen- 
eralized view of books, their function and 
their value. It is time that I turned to 
more definite considerations. 

You will expect me, no doubt, to say 
something of the relative value of books, 
to indicate some principles in choosing 
them, and to mark, perhaps, some lines 
for reading. There must always be a 



ABOUT BOOKS 13 

difficulty in that undertaking for any per- 
son who would give advice to others con- 
cerning books, though his knowledge of 
them surpassed mine a hundredfold. For 
the same book has never the same value 
for all minds, and scarcely two readers 
can follow the same course in their read- 
ing with the same good. There is a per- 
sonal bent of mind which ought to have 
its way in this matter, so far as a deliber- 
ate judgment in the mind itself will allow. 
So far, that is, as one can willingly do it 
who desires the fullest culture that his 
mind is capable of receiving, he should 
humor its inclinations. Against an eager 
delight in poetry, for example, he should 
not force himself, I am sure, to an obsti- 
nate reading of science ; nor vice versa. 
But the lover of poetry who neglects 
science entirely, and the devotee of 
science who scorns acquaintance with 
poetry, are equally guilty of a foolish 
mutilation of themselves. The man of 
science needs, even for a large appre- 



i 4 A FAMILIAR TALK 

hension of scientific truth, and still more 
for a large and healthy development of 
his own being, that best exercise of im- 
agination which true poetry alone can 
give. The man of poetic nature, on the 
other hand, needs the discipline of judg- 
ment and reason for which exact learn- 
ing of some kind is indispensable. 

So inclination is a guide to follow, in 
reading as in other pursuits, with extrem- 
est caution ; and there is one favorite di- 
rection in which we can never trust it 
safely. That is down the smooth way of 
indolent amusement, where the gardens 
of weedy romance are, and the fields in 
which idle gossip is gathered by farmers 
of news. Of the value of romance in 
true literature, and of the intellectual 
worth of that knowledge of passing 
events which is news in the real sense, I 
may possibly say something before I am 
done. I touch them now only to remark, 
that the inclination which draws many 
people so easily into a dissipated reading 



ABOUT BOOKS 15 

of trashy novels and puerile news-gossip 
is something very different from the incli- 
nation of mind which carries some to sci- 
ence, some to history, some to poetry. 
In the latter there is a turn of intellect, 
a push of special faculties, a leaning of 
taste, which demand respect, as I have 
said. The former is nothing more than 
one kind of the infirmity which produces 
laziness in all its modes. The state of a 
novel-steeped mind is just that of a loun- 
ging, lolling, slouching body, awake and 
alive enough for some superficial pleas- 
ant tickling of sense-consciousness, but 
with all energy drained out of it and all 
the joy of strength in action unknown. 
It is a loaferish mind that can loll by the 
hour over trash and trivialities in a novel 
or a newspaper. 

To come back to the question of 
choice among good books: there is a 
certain high region in all departments 
of literature which every reader who 
cares to make the most of himself and 



16 A FAMILIAR TALK 

the best of life ought to penetrate and 
become in some measure acquainted 
with, whatever his personal leanings may- 
be. It is the region of the great books — 
the greatest, that is, of the greater kinds. 
For the realm of literature is a vast uni- 
verse of solar systems — of suns and sat- 
ellites ; and, while no man can hope 
to explore it all, he may seek and find 
the central sources of light in it and take 
an illumination from them which no re- 
flected rays can give. In poetry (which 
I must speak of again), I doubt if many 
people can read very much of minor 
verse — the verse of merely ingenious 
fancies and melodious lines — with intel- 
lectual benefit, whatever pleasure it may 
afford them. But the great poems, which 
fuse thought and imagination into one 
glorified utterance, will carry an enrich- 
ment beyond measuring into any mind 
that has capacity to receive them. I be- 
lieve that those fortunate young people 
who are wise enough, or wisely enough 



ABOUT BOOKS 17 

directed, to engrave half of Shakespeare 
upon their memories, lastingly, in their 
youth, with , something of Milton, some- 
thing of Goethe, something of Words- 
worth, something of Keats, something of 
Tennyson something of Browning, some- 
thing of Dante, something of Homer and 
the Greek dramatists, with much of He- 
brew poetry from the Bible, have made 
a noble beginning of the fullest and 
finest culture that is possible. To mem- 
orize great poems in early life is to lay 
a store in the mind for which its happy 
possessor can never be too thankful in 
after years. I speak from experience, 
not of the possession of such a store, 
but of the want of it. I have felt the want 
greatly since I came to years when mem- 
ory will not take deposits graciously, 
nor keep them with faithfulness, and I 
warn you that if these riches are to be 
yours at all you must gather them in 
your youth. 

A great poem is like a mountain top, 



18 A FAMILIAR TALK 

which invites one toward the heavens, 
into a new atmosphere, ami a new vision 
of the world, and a new seise of being. 
There are no other equal heights in liter- 
ature except those which have been at- 
tained by a few teachers of tl e divinest 
truth, who have borne messages of right- 
eousness to mankind. Even as literature, 
to be read for nothing more than their 
quality and their influence as such, what 
can compare with the parables and dis- 
courses of Jesus, as reported in the 
Gospels ? I know of nothing else that 
comes nearer to them than a few of the 
dialogues of Plato, which exhibit the char- 
acter and represent the higher teachings 
of Socrates. The three dialogues called 
the "Apology," the "Crito," and the 
"Phaedo," which tell the sublime story of 
the trial and death of Socrates, are writ- 
ings that I would put next to the books 
of the Evangelists in the library of every 
young reader. They were published 
separately a few years ago, in a small, 



ABOUT BOOKS 19 

attractive volume, under the title of " The 
Trial and Death of Socrates," and they 
are also to be found in the second vol- 
ume of the fine translation of Plato made 
by Professor Jowett. Another selection of 
half a dozen of the best of the Socratic 
dialogues can be had in a charming little 
book entitled "Talks with Athenian 
Youths." By the side of these, I would 
put the " Thoughts " of the Emperor 
Marcus Aurelius and the " Enchiridion " 
of Epictetus; and not far from them I 
would place the " Essays " of Lord Bacon 
and of our own wise Emerson. 

These are books, not of mere Know- 
ledge, but of Wisdom, which is far above 
Knowledge. Knowledge is brought into 
the mind ; Wisdom is from its own 
springs. Knowledge is the fruit of learn- 
ing ; Wisdom is the fruit of meditation. 
Knowledge is related to the facts of life, 
and to man in his dependence on them ; 
Wisdom is concerned with life itself, and 
with man in his own being. Knowledge 



20 A FAMILIAR TALK 

equips us for our duties and tasks ; Wis- 
dom lights them up for us. The great 
meditative books, such as these I have 
named, are books that have lifted, exalted, 
illuminated millions of minds, and their 
power will never be spent. A book of 
science grows stale with age, and is 
superseded by another. The book of 
wisdom can never grow old. But in this 
age of science it is apt to be neglected, 
and therefore I speak with some plead- 
ing for it. Do not pass it by in your read- 
ing. 

In what I say to you, I am thinking of 
books as we use them in reading, not in 
study. Study has some special cultivation 
of mind or particular acquisition in view ; 
reading is a more general, discursive, and 
lighter pursuit of the good that is in 
books. Now, it is looking at them in that 
way, broadly, that I will make a few sug- 
gestions about books which belong in 
what I have classed as the literature of 
knowledge. I would award the highest 



ABOUT BOOKS 21 

place in that class to history, because it 
gives more exercise than any other, not 
alone to every faculty of our intelligence, 
— to our reason, our judgment, our 
memory, and our imagination, — but to 
every moral sensibility we possess. But 
if history is to be read with that effect, it 
must not be read as a mere collection of 
stories of war and battle, revolution and 
adventure. It must not be traversed as 
one strolls through a picture gallery, 
looking at one thing in a frame here, and 
another thing in a frame there, — an epi- 
sode depicted by this historian, an epoch 
by that one, the career of a nation by a 
third, — each distinct from every other, 
in its own framing, and considered in 
itself. To read history in that way is to 
lose all its meaning and teaching. On 
the contrary, we must keep always in our 
minds a view of history as one great 
whole, and the chief interest we find in it 
should be that of discovering the connec- 
tion and relation of each part to other 



22 A FAMILIAR TALK 

parts. Of course we have to pick up our 
knowledge of it in pieces and sections ; 
but only so fast as we can put them to- 
gether, and acquire a wide, comprehen- 
sive survey of events and movements, in 
many countries, will historical knowledge 
become real knowledge to us, and its 
interest and value be disclosed to our 
minds. We see then what a seamless web 
it is, woven, as Goethe describes it, in 
" the roaring loom of time," of unbroken 
threads which stretch from the begin- 
ning of the life of men on the earth, and 
which will spin onward to the end. We 
read then the history of our own country 
as a part of the history of the English 
people, and the history of the English 
people as a part of the history of the Ger- 
manic race, and Germanic history in its 
close sequence to Roman history, and Ro- 
man history as the outcome of conditions 
which trace back to Greece and the an- 
cient East. We read the thrilling nar- 
rative of our great civil war, not as a 



ABOUT BOOKS 23 

tragical story which begins at Sumter and 
ends at Appomattox, but as the tremen- 
dous catastrophe of a long, inflexible 
series of effects and causes which runs 
back from the New World into the Old, 
and through centuries of time, slowly 
engendering the conflict which exploded 
at last in the rebellion of a slave-holding 
self-interest against the hard-won supre- 
macy of a national conscience. 

Concerning history, then, I come back 
again, with special emphasis, to the coun- 
sel I gave generally before : read the 
great books, which spread it out for you 
in large views. Whatever you may seek 
in the way of minute details and close 
studies, here and there, for this and that 
period and country, get a general ground- 
work for them in your mind from the 
comprehensive surveys of the great his- 
torians. Above all, read Gibbon. If you 
would comprehend modern history, you 
must read his " Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire." It is the one funda- 



24 A FAMILIAR TALK 

mental work. Though it is old, nothing 
supersedes it. It is an unequaled, unap- 
proached panorama of more than a thou- 
sand years of time, crowded with the 
most pregnant events, on the central 
stage of human history. Whatever else 
you read or do not read, you cannot 
afford to neglect Gibbon. 

Of the ages before Gibbon's period, 
in Roman, Greek, and Oriental history, 
there is nothing which offers a really large, 
comprehensive survey. But Maspero, 
Sayce, McCurdy, Thirlwall, Grote, Cur- 
tius, Mahaffy, Mommsen, Merivale, are 
of the best. For a brief, clear account of 
the Roman Republic, sketching its inner 
rather than its surface history, I know of 
nothing else so good as Horton's " His- 
tory of the Roman People." 

Generally, as regards ancient history, 
there is a warning which I find to be 
needed. Within quite recent years, the 
discoveries that have been made, by 
digging into buried ruins of old cities, 



ABOUT BOOKS 25 

bringing to light and comparing great 
numbers of records from the remotest 
times, preserved by their inscription on 
earthen tablets and on stone, have so 
added to and so corrected our knowledge 
of ancient history that the narratives of 
the older historians have become of little 
worth. It is an utter waste of time, for 
example, to read the venerable Rollin, 
new editions of whose history are still 
being published and sold. You might 
as well go to Ptolemy for astronomy, or 
to Aristotle for physical science. It is a 
worse waste of time to read Abbott his- 
tories, and their kind. Beware of them. 
Mediaeval history, too, and many pe- 
riods more modern, have received new 
light which discredits more or less the 
historians who were trusted a generation 
or two ago. Hallam is found to be wrong 
in important parts of his view of the in- 
stitutions of feudalism. Hume is seen to 
give untrue representations of English 
political history at some of its chief turn- 



26 A FAMILIAR TALK 

ing points. Macaulay has done frequent 
injustice in his powerful arraignment of 
great actors on the British stage. The 
study and the writing of history have be- 
come more painstaking, more accurate, 
more dispassionate, less partisan and less 
eloquent, but more just. We get the 
surest and broadest views of it in Free- 
man, Stubbs, Maitland, Green, Gairdner, 
Gardiner, Ranke, May, Lecky, and See- 
ley for English history, with Bagehot to 
describe the present working of the Eng- 
lish Constitution. 

In continental history, mediaeval and 
modern, I will mention just a few among 
many of the books which I think can be 
recommended safely : Church's " Begin- 
nings of the Middle Ages," Emerton's 
"Mediaeval Europe," Bryce's "Holy 
Roman Empire," some of Freeman's 
" Historical Essays," Milman's "History 
of Latin Christianity," Symonds's " Re- 
naissance in Italy," Trollope's " Com- 
monwealth of Florence," Ranke' s and 



ABOUT BOOKS 27 

Creighton's histories of the Papacy in 
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
Hausser's " Period of the Reformation," 
Baird's Huguenot histories, Motley's 
M Rise of the Dutch Republic " and 
" United Netherlands," Gindely or Gar- 
diner's " Thirty Years War," Perkins's 
" France under Mazarin," " France under 
the Regency," and " France under Louis 
XV.," Rocquain's " Revolutionary Spirit 
Preceding the Revolution," Prof. Henry 
Morse Stephen's " French Revolution," 
Fournier's " Napoleon," Thayer's " Dawn 
of Italian Independence," Andrews's 
" Historical Development of Modern Eu- 
rope," and the series by different writers, 
entitled " Periods of European History," 
edited by Arthur Hassell. Moreover, the 
little books in the series called " Epochs 
of English History" and "Epochs of 
Modern History" are almost all of them 
excellent. 

Into American history it is best, for 
several reasons, that we, of this country, 



28 A FAMILIAR TALK 

should go more thoroughly than into that 
of other countries. One who tries to get 
his knowledge of it from a single book 
or two will remain very ignorant. The 
best of the general narratives which at- 
tempt to cover the whole, from Columbus, 
or even from Captain John Smith, to 
President McKinley, are only sketches 
that need to be filled. For many parts of 
that filling, the series of volumes now in 
course of publication under the general 
editorship of Professor Hart, of Harvard 
University, in which successive periods 
and movements are treated by different 
writers, can be recommended safely. 
"The American Nation: A History," is 
the title of the series. But take from John 
Fiske, I would say, his colonial histo- 
ries, — especially " Old Virginia and her 
Neighbours " and " The Dutch and Qua- 
ker Colonies," — and his story of " The 
American Revolution," together with 
that of "The Critical Period " which fol- 
lowed it, down to the adoption of the Fed- 



ABOUT BOOKS 29 

eral Constitution. For your own delight 
you should linger long enough in colo- 
nial times to read all that Parkman has 
written of the French in America and of 
their great effort to possess the continent. 
Irving, in his " Life of Washington," and 
McMaster, in his " History of the People 
of the United States," will give you a good 
knowledge of the first years of the repub- 
lic ; but you will never understand Jeffer- 
son and Madison, and the rise of the great 
old political parties, and the War of 181 2 
with England, if you do not read the his- 
tory written by Henry Adams, which cov- 
ers the time between John Adams and 
Monroe. For the next third of a century, 
I would trust to Hoist's " Constitutional 
and Political History," and Professor 
Burgess's history of "The Middle Pe- 
riod," as it is named in the " American 
History Series." These works are made 
needlessly hard reading by their style, 
but they are full of good instruction. 
With them I would place half a dozen 



30 A FAMILIAR TALK 

of the biographies in the series of the 
"American Statesmen," for side lights 
thrown upon the politics of the time. 
Then take Rhodes's " History of the 
United States from the Compromise of 
1850," which carries you through and be- 
yond the civil war. For that great strug- 
gle I consider Nicolay and Hay's " Abra- 
ham Lincoln " to be, on the whole, the best 
history that has been written yet. It is a 
huge work, in many volumes, but no one 
who reads it will waste time or easily tire. 
Along with it should be read the collected 
writings of Abraham Lincoln, which are 
the most lasting literature, excepting, 
perhaps, Emerson's " Essays," that Amer- 
ica has produced. As a whole series of 
state papers, I believe that the speeches, 
letters, messages, and proclamations of 
President Lincoln are the most extraor- 
dinary, in wisdom, in spirit, and in com- 
position, that ever came, in any country 
or any age, from the tongue and pen 
of one man. You will find it an educa- 



ABOUT BOOKS 31 

tion, both in literature and in politics, to 
read them again and again. Read, too, 
the simply and nobly written " Personal 
Memoirs," of General Grant, with those 
of Sherman, Sheridan, and Joe Johnston, 
Long's " Life of Lee," Blame's " Twenty 
Years in Congress," and your knowledge 
of rebellion history will be quite complete. 
Then cap your reading in this region of 
history and politics with Bryce's " Amer- 
ican Commonwealth," and I would have 
no great desire to urge more. 

Biography is in one sense a part of 
history ; but that which interests us in 
it most, and from which we take the 
most good, if we take any, is more than 
historical. The story of a life which offers 
nothing but its incidents, informs us of 
nothing but its achievements, was never 
worth the telling. Fill it with romance, 
or glorify it with great triumphs, and still 
there is small worth in it. If he who lived 
the life is not in himself more interesting 
and more significant to us than all the 



32 A FAMILIAR TALK 

circumstance of his life, then the circum- 
stance is vainly set forth. What biogra- 
phy at its best can give us, as the finest 
form of history, and as more than his- 
tory, is the personal revelation, the in-seen 
portraiture of here and there a human 
soul which is not common in its quality. 
The exemplars that it sets most abun- 
dantly before us, of a vulgar kind of prac- 
tical success in the world, — the success 
of a mere self-seeking talent and industry 
applied to private business or to public 
affairs, — are well enough in their way, 
and may make some small impressions 
of good effect on some minds ; but we 
take no inspiration from them — they 
give us no ideals. What we ought to seek 
everywhere in books is escape from the 
commonplace — the commonplace in 
thought and the commonplace in char- 
acter with which our daily life surrounds 
us. Our chief dependence is on books 
to bring us into intercourse with the 
picked, choice examples of human kind ; 



ABOUT BOOKS 33 

to show us what they are or what they 
have beetiy as well as what they have 
thought, — what they have done, as well 
as what they have said, — with what mo- 
tives, from what impulses, with what 
powers, to what ends, in what spirit, the 
work of their lives has been done. When 
biography does that for us it is one of 
the most precious forms of literature. But 
when it only crams our library shelves 
with " process-print " pictures, so to 
speak, of commonplace characters in 
commonplace settings of life, we waste 
time in reading it. I know people who 
relish biography as they would relish 
gossip in talk, delighting in disclosures 
from other men's and other women's 
lives, no matter how trivial, and all the 
more, perhaps, when some spicing of 
scandal is in them. So far as it invites 
reading in that spirit there is nothing to 
commend it. But I have never known 
one person who enjoyed what may be 
called the fine flavors of character in 



34 A FAMILIAR TALK 

biography who had not fine tastes in all 
literature. 

The composition of biography would 
seem to be one of the most difficult of 
literary arts, since masterpieces in it are 
so few. The delightful and noble sub- 
jects that have been offered it in every 
age of the world are abounding in num- 
ber, but how many have been worthily 
treated? One can almost count on his 
fingers the biographical works that hold a 
classic place in common esteem. Gener- 
ally, of the best and greatest and most 
beautiful lives that have been lived there 
is no story which communicates the gran- 
deur or the charm as we ought to be 
made to feel it. 

The most famous of biographies, that 
of Doctor Samuel Johnson by his ad- 
miring friend Boswell, has a strong and 
striking personality for its subject ; but 
who can read it without wishing that 
some figure more impressive in human 
history stood where a strange fortune has 



ABOUT BOOKS 35 

put the sturdy old Tory, in the wonder- 
ful light that reveals him so immortally ? 
Among literary men, Sir Walter Scott 
has come nearer, perhaps, than any other 
to Doctor Johnson's good fortune, in the 
life of him written by Lockhart, his son- 
in-law. Trevelyan's " Life and Letters of 
Macaulay," and the " Memoirs of Charles 
Kingsley " by his wife, are probably the 
best of later examples in literary biogra- 
phy. But in a certain view all the more 
eminent " Men of Letters," English and 
American, may be called biographically 
fortunate since the publication in Eng- 
land and America of the two series of 
small biographies so named. It is true 
that these are rather to be looked upon 
as critical studies and sketches than as 
biographies in the adequate sense ; but 
most of them are remarkably good in 
their way, and for these busy days of 
many books they may suffice. The same 
is true of the " Twelve English States- 
men" series in political biography, as 



36 A FAMILIAR TALK 

well as of the series of " American States- 
men," alluded to before. 

Using the term " study" in the sense 
in which artists use it, when, for example, 
they distinguish between a portrait and 
a " study of a head," I should apply it 
to a large class of biographical sketches 
which are as true to literary art as the 
most finished biography could be, and 
only lack its completeness in detail. The 
prototype of all such writings is found in 
" Plutarch's Lives," which are studies — 
comparative studies — of the great char- 
acters of antiquity, and models to this day 
of their kind. As we have them in Dry- 
den's translation revised by Clough, or 
in the old translation by North which 
Shakespeare used, there is no better read- 
ing for old or for young. 

Scientific biography is at its best, I 
should say, in the " Life and Letters 
of Charles Darwin," by his son. In the 
a Life and Letters " of Huxley, the letters 
are delightful, and the story of the life 



ABOUT BOOKS 37 

is most interesting, despite a lack of skill 
in the telling. The " Life of Thomas 
Edward," the humble Scotch naturalist, 
by Doctor Samuel Smiles, is hardly to 
be surpassed as a book of edification 
and delight, especially for the young. 
Smiles's " Life of Robert Dick " is nearly 
but not quite as good ; and the " Auto- 
biography of James Nasmyth," man of 
science and great engineer, edited by the 
same skillful hand, is one of the books 
which I never lose an opportunity to press 
upon boys, for the sake of the wonderful 
example it sets before them, of a thought- 
ful plan of life perse veringly carried out, 
from beginning to end. Other works of 
Smiles in industrial biography — lives 
of Watts, the Stephensons, and many 
more — are all exceptionally interesting 
and wholesome to read. 

Franklin's autobiography, in the same 
line of interest and influence, is one of the 
books which the world would be greatly 
poorer without. Grimm's " Life of Mi- 



38 A FAMILIAR TALK 

chael Angelo " takes a kindred lesson of 
life and lifts it to a setting more heroic. 
Goethe's autobiography and his " Con- 
versations with Eckermann " are of the 
books that stamp themselves inefface- 
ably on a receptive mind, and that ought 
to be read before the enthusiasms of 
youth are outworn. 

But I am particularizing books much 
more than it was my intention to do. I 
had planned a hasty excursion along the 
watersheds of literature, so to speak, just 
to notice some features of the geography 
of the world of books, and point here and 
there to a monument that seemed impor- 
tant in my view. To assume to be really 
a guide for any other reading than my 
own is more than I am willing to under- 
take. 



II 



THE TEST OF QUALITY IN 
BOOKS 



THE TEST OF QUALITY IN 
BOOKS 1 

The total result of the education of man- 
kind is that which we call Civilization, 
meaning progress toward the finer fitting 
of men and women for life in the social 
state. Most of us are too much inclined, 
I think, to measure the civilization of our 
own day by its science, which is no true 
measure at all. The science of the pre- 
sent age has grown to be very wonderful ; 
but, much as it may excite us to aston- 
ishment, there are fruits of civilization, 
even in this crude period (and it is very 
crude), which command our admiration 
more. The finest and most beautiful 
human products of the time, whom even 
the Philistines would join us in choosing 

1 From some remarks to the Library School at 
the New York State Library, in May, 1895. 



42 THE TEST OF 

for honor, as exemplars to their genera- 
tion, might not pass an examination in 
physics or biology. They are the men 
and women, sweet with the sweetness and 
luminous with the light which Matthew 
Arnold never tired of extolling, who re- 
present that side of civilization which is 
refinement more than knowledge, or 
which is knowledge refined. I speak 
wrongly, however, when I say of that re- 
finement that it is one side of civilization ; 
for it is civilization, and all science that 
lacks it is barbaric, even though steam 
engines and the dynamos of Niagara are 
shaking the earth at its command. 

Now, the refinements of life come 
chiefly from its pleasures. That is true to 
an extent that is sure to surprise us when 
we think of it first. Unfortunately, it is 
no less true that the meaner influences 
which vitiate and vulgarize life, making 
it gross and coarse, come from the plea- 
sure side of existence, too. There the 
main sources of the two are together : on 



QUALITY IN BOOKS 43 

one hand, the springs of all art, — music, 
poetry, romance, drama, sculpture, paint- 
ing, — brimmed with delights of the im- 
agination and the joy of the beauty of 
the world ; on the other hand, the muddy 
wells into which so many people choose 
perversely to dip. From these two foun- 
tains of pleasure-giving art, one polluted 
and the other pure, the differing streams 
are ever flowing. Which of them has 
floated to us an offered book of entertain- 
ment is what we must know, if we can. 

Whether the book is alive with genius 
or dead with the lack of it, — whether it 
is brilliant or commonplace, — whether 
clumsiness or skill is in the construction 
of it, — are not the first questions to be 
asked. The prior question, as I conceive, 
is this : Does the book leave any kind of 
wholesome and fine feeling in the mind 
of one who reads it ? That is not a ques- 
tion concerning the mere morality of the 
book, in the conventional meaning of the 
term. It touches the whole quality of the 



44 THE TEST OF 

work as one of true literature. "Does 
it leave any kind of wholesome and fine 
feeling in the mind of one who reads it ? " 
There is no mistaking a feeling of that 
nature, though it may never seem twice 
the same in our experience of it. Some- 
times it may be to us as though we had 
eaten of good food ; at other times like 
the tasting of wine ; at others, again, like 
a draught of water from a cool spring. 
Some books that we read will make us 
feel that we are lifted as on wings ; some 
will make music within us ; some will 
give us visions ; some will just fill us with 
a happy content. In such feelings there 
is a refining potency that seems to be 
equaled in nothing else. The simplest 
art is as sure to produce them as the high- 
est. We take them from Burns' s lines 
" To a Field-Mouse,' ' from Wordsworth's 
" Poor Susan," from the story of Ruth, 
from the story of " The Vicar of Wake- 
field," from the story of " Picciola," from 
the story of " Daddy Darwin's Dovecot," 



QUALITY IN BOOKS 45 

as certainly as from " Hamlet" or from 
" Henry Esmond." The true pleasure, 
the fine pleasure, the civilizing pleasure 
to be drawn from any form of art is one 
which leaves a distinctly wholesome feel- 
ing of some such nature as these that I 
have tried to describe ; and the poem, the 
romance, the play, the music, or the pic- 
ture, which has nothing of the sort to 
give us, but only a moment of sensation 
and then blankness, does us no kind of 
good, however innocent of positive evil 
it may be. 

If the wholesome feeling which all true 
art produces, in literature or elsewhere, is 
unmistakable, so, too, are those feelings 
of the other nature which works of an op- 
posite character give rise to. Our minds 
are as sensitive to a moral force of gravi- 
tation as our bodies are sensitive to the 
physical force, and we are as conscious 
of the downward pull upon us of a vulgar 
tale or a vicious play as we are conscious 
of the buoyant lift of one that is nobly 



46 THE TEST OF 

written. We have likewise a mental 
touch, to which the texture of coarse lit- 
erature is a fact as distinct as the grit 
in a muddy road that we grind with our 
heels; And so I will say again that the 
conclusive test for a book which offers 
pleasure rather than knowledge is in the 
question, " Does it leave any kind of 
wholesome and fine feeling in the mind 
of one who reads it ? " 

All this which I am saying is opposed 
to a doctrine preached in our day, by a 
school of pretenders in art, whose chat- 
ter has made too much impression on 
careless minds. It appeared first, I be- 
lieve, among the painters, in France, and 
French literature took infection from it ; 
then England became somewhat diseased, 
and America is not without peril. It is 
the false doctrine which phrases itself in 
the meaningless motto — " Art for Art's 
sake ! " " Pursue Art for Art's sake," — 
"Enjoy Art for Art's sake," cry these 
aesthetic prophets, who have no compre- 



QUALITY IN BOOKS 47 

hension of what Art is. As well talk of 
sailing a ship for the ship's sake, — of 
wheeling a cart for the cart's sake, — of 
articulating words for the words' sake. 
Art is a vessel, a vehicle, for the carriage 
and communication of something from 
one mind to another mind, — from one 
soul to another soul. Without a content, 
it has no more reason for its being than 
a meaningless word could have in human 
speech. Considered in itself and for its 
own sake, it has no existence ; it is an 
imposture — a mere simulation of Art ; 
for that which would be Art, if filled duly 
with meanings and laden with a mes- 
sage, is then but an artisan's handicraft. 
The truth is, there are cunning deceits 
in this pretension to " Art for Art's sake." 
Those who lead the cry for it do not 
mean what their words seem to imply. 
They do not mean the emptiness that one 
might suppose. What they do mean, as 
a rule, is to put something ignoble in the 
place of what should be noble ; some- 



48 TEST OF QUALITY IN BOOKS 

thing vulgar or something vile in the 
place of what should be wholly pure and 
wholly fine. What they really strive to 
do is to degrade the content of Art, and 
to persuade the world that it can be made 
the vehicle of mean ideals without ceasing 
to be Art in the noble sense. The work- 
ers to that end in literature are very busy, 
and I suggest this as an important rule 
in the choosing of books : Beware of the 
literature of the school which preaches 
" Art for Art's sake." 



Ill 

HINTS AS TO READING 



HINTS AS TO READING 1 

I MAY take for granted, in what I say 
this evening, that no one who hears me 
is .indifferent to what Mr. Maurice has 
called " the friendship of books/' nor re- 
quires to be persuaded that the reading 
of good books is an occupation of time 
so delightful and so profitable that hardly 
any other can be preferred to it. I may 
take that for granted, because it is fair to 
assume that no one who feels indifferent 
or repugnant to books would come to hear 
them talked about. And I am glad that 
it is so ; because I should have no faith to 
encourage me in speaking to people of 
that mind. I should not hope to make 
books appear attractive to any man or 
any woman who has grown to maturity 
without feeling the charm of them. I 
1 From a lecture. 



52 HINTS AS TO READING 

would do so most gladly if I could ; for 
not many misfortunes appeal to me more. 
To know nothing of the friendship that 
never fails, the companionship that never 
tires, the entertainment that is never far 
to seek nor costly to command, the 
blessed resource that can save every pre- 
cious hour of life from the dreadful wick- 
edness of " the killing of Time," — what 
poverty is greater than that ! 

Assuming that the worth and the 
charm of books are undisputed in this 
company, there is nothing in question 
here except the discriminations to be ex- 
ercised among them. I am to offer you 
such suggestions as I can concerning the 
reading of books and the choice of books 
for reading. For reading, be it remem- 
bered, not for study. The distinction be- 
tween readers and students is one that I 
wish to keep in mind. The student, as 
we think of him, stands for the scholar, 
to whom books are the business of life, 
first and before all things, — fundamen- 



HINTS AS TO READING 53 

tal, — implemental, — professional. The 
reader, on the other hand, has something 
else for vocation and chief employment, 
and his book is a happy incident, which 
night brings to him, perhaps, with his 
slippers, his easy-chair, and his lamp. 
What he asks from it is not scholarship, 
but a well-rounded knowledge, — a 
wholesome culture, — a quickened im- 
agination, — a mind nourished and re- 
freshed. We may all be readers, even to 
a large, broad measure of the term ; but 
not many can be students and scholars, 
in the completer sense. Yet some fraction 
of true scholarship ought to be perfected 
in every one. 

And this, in fact, is the first suggestion 
I am moved to make, — namely, that, 
while it is both necessary and better for 
the majority of people that they should 
be readers of books in a general way, 
rather than students and specialists of 
learning, it is better still that the reading 
of each one should range with wide free- 



54 HINTS AS TO READING 

dom round some centre of actual study, 
some chapter of history, some question, 
some language, some work or some per- 
sonality in literature, — it scarcely mat- 
ters what, so long as a little definite 
province of knowledge is really occupied 
and possessed, while larger territories 
around it are only reconnoitred and over- 
run. I say it is better for the majority of 
people that they should be readers in a 
general way, rather than students, be- 
cause they have not the leisure nor the 
freedom of mind for large subjects of 
study, and it is ill for the mind to focus 
it on small themes too exclusively. 
Among teachers and original investi- 
gators the specialization of learning be- 
comes every day more necessary, as the 
bulk of science increases ; but every spe- 
cialist puts his soul in peril, so to speak, 
by the risk of narrowed faculties and an 
intellectual myopia to which he is ex- 
posed. So I would not, for my own part, 
give a word of encouragement to that 



HINTS AS TO READING 55 

growing class of people who may be 
called the class of amateur specialists ; be- 
cause their exclusive devotion to special 
subjects seems too little and too much; — 
too little, that is, for any service to human 
knowledge, and too much for the best 
development of themselves. I feel no 
doubt, in the least, that breadth of culture 
is more important, on the whole, than its 
depth, to the generality of mankind ; that 
their character and capability as mem- 
bers of society are affected more by the 
area of their knowledge and by the diver- 
sity of their acquaintance with good lit- 
erature, than by the minuteness of either. 
At the same time, I would urge, as I 
say, the specializing of some object in the 
intellectual pursuits of every man and 
woman; not to the exclusion of other 
subjects and objects, but to their subor- 
dination. Let there be one thing for each 
of us that we try to know somewhere 
nearly to the bottom, with certainty, pre- 
cision, exactness ; not so much for the 



56 HINTS AS TO READING 

value of the knowledge itself, as for the 
value of the discipline of thoroughness. 
If it is something in the line of our daily 
occupations, — something bearing upon 
our particular work in the world, me- 
chanical, commercial, professional, what- 
ever it maybe, — so much the better. 
Then, around that one centre of positive 
study, turning on it as on a pivot, let 
there be circle after circle drawn of wide 
discursive reading. 

If this seems to be a doctrine that is 
too indulgent of easy habits in reading, 
and too favorable to superficiality, I will 
hasten to introduce a second suggestion 
which cannot be so suspected. It shall 
be more than a suggestion, for I would 
make it a very serious admonition and 
injunction to all who will give atten- 
tion to me on this subject : Be temperate 
in Newspapers ! For there is an intem- 
perance in the newspaper-reading of the 
day which looks nearly as threatening to 
me as the intemperance that is fed from 



HINTS AS TO READING 57 

the brewery and the still. To a certain 
extent, — and I would not be narrow in 
measuring it, — good newspapers are to 
be rated with good books, and even be- 
fore them in one view, because no other 
reading is so indispensable to the edu- 
cation that accords with the conditions 
of life at the present day. I value as 
highly as one reasonably can the wonder- 
ful news-knowledge of our time. It is 
sweeping so much pettiness, so much 
small provincialism, out of the feeling and 
thinking of men, making them cosmo- 
politan, cooperative, tolerant ! With the 
whole world gathered into one neighbor- 
hood, so to speak, and the daily story of 
its doings and happenings made the talk 
of the breakfast-table, morning by morn- 
ing, and the chat of the club and the sit- 
ting-room evening by evening ; with the 
calamities of Asia, the catastrophes of 
the South Sea, the tragedies of Muscovy, 
the agitations of Paris, the politics of 
London, the sensations of New York, 



58 HINTS AS TO READING 

poured hourly into our consciousness, 
along with the passing events of our own 
lives and of the little circles in which we 
revolve, — how can we fail to outgrow 
in our sympathies and ideas the provin- 
cial boundaries that were hard and fast 
for earlier men ? It is a mighty factor in 
modern education, this flying world-news 
that takes wings from the daily press and 
is gathered from the uttermost parts of 
the earth. 

But the staple of it, after all, is gossip ; 
— world-gossip, to be sure, — history- 
gossip in great part, — but gossip, never- 
theless ; and overmuch of it is thin nour- 
ishment for any robust and capable mind. 
Unwholesome, too, as well as thin. There 
is a kind of moral narcotism common 
to every species of gossip, high or low, 
which takes possession, like an opium- 
habit, of the minds that are much given 
to it, and works degeneracy in them. 
Who can mistake the morbid effects in 
that direction which appear in the news- 



HINTS AS TO READING 59 

paper-reading world, and which seem 
to be magnified from day to day ? The 
craving for coarser flavors in the news- 
reports ; for more pungency of sensation ; 
more photography of vice ; more dram- 
atization of crime ; more puerile person- 
ality ; more spying and eaves-dropping ; 
more invasion and desecration of the pri- 
vacies and sacred things of life ; — that 
insatiable craving, which popular jour- 
nalism panders to, seems to have an in- 
cessant growth from what it feeds on, 
and one shudders in imagining the pitch 
of enterprise and audacity to which re- 
porters may yet be pushed by it. The 
fault is no more than half on the side of 
the newspapers ; it belongs as much, or 
more, to the readers for whose taste the 
popular newspapers are made up ; and I 
am convinced that, if we track home this 
disease of taste which is gluttonous of the 
garbage of news, we shall find it mostly 
among people whose sole literature is 
from the daily and hebdomadal press ; 



60 HINTS AS TO READING 

who read newspapers and nothing else. 
They constitute a great class, and I fear 
it is a growing class, — in this country 
more, perhaps, than in any other. We are 
called "a reading people ; " but a news- 
paper-reading people may be the truer 
description ; and neither we nor our news- 
papers, as I have tried to indicate, are im- 
proved by the excess of interest in them. 
Let us read the news of the day, by 
all means. Let us never fail to keep 
abreast of it, in fair acquaintance with the 
current movements of event and opinion, 
maintaining and cultivating a healthy 
interest in the affairs of the world, great 
and small, and in the doing, feeling, and 
thinking of our living fellow men. But 
let us be temperate in it ; let us not 
saturate ourselves with the sensations of 
the passing day. Let us reserve some 
room in our minds for a knowledge of 
the past, its ideas and its history, and of 
present things that are not caught by the 
reporter's pencil or the editor's pen. 



HINTS AS TO READING 61 

I have placed intemperance in news- 
paper-reading even before intemperance 
in novel-reading, because I look upon it 
as the more serious of the two ; but the 
latter is a very grave evil, contributing 
to a mental and moral debility which we 
must not treat lightly. Understand that 
I speak only of intemperance in novel- 
reading, or of intemperance and ill-selec- 
tion together ; for I am not of those who 
despise the novel, or condemn it in a 
sweeping way. In my view it has its 
place among the higher forms of litera- 
ture, — of literature as art, — and so far 
as it is made fitting to that high place, 
by the genius which has a right to create 
it, the novel is a gift to be welcomed and 
enjoyed. In the reading of a young per- 
son I would not withhold a fair — even a 
liberal — proportion of wholesome and 
finely woven romance. We must not be 
of the school of the Gradgrinds. Some 
nutriment is demanded for our souls be- 
sides the nutriment of facts. The intel- 



62 HINTS AS TO READING 

lectual life is not all remembering, or all 
reckoning and reasoning. It includes 
feeling and imagination, and we need to 
cultivate that side of our nature no less 
than the other, for a rounded, sane devel- 
opment of ourselves. We need to culti- 
vate it, moreover, by other means and 
from other sources than books. Nature, 
to those who read her, is more eloquent 
than any poem ; and no love-tale is so 
interesting as the every-day life that we 
have under our eyes. Yet the poetry and 
romance in books have a singular impor- 
tance in this region of culture, because, 
if we choose them well, they can bring 
to us the reinforcement of imaginations 
that are greater than our own, and touch 
us through sensibilities and sympathies 
that are finer than we possess. If they do 
not that, they can do us no good, and 
we may better leave them unread. 

What I say of romance need only be 
writ larger for poetry, and it is equally 
true. A true poem — the simplest true 



HINTS AS TO READING 63 

poem — will bring something to us that 
is a revelation ; some glimpse that we 
never had before of a meaning in things 
that lights them up to us ; or some thrill 
of an emotion which attunes us in newly- 
felt relations with God, or Nature, or Man. 
There is no true poetry which does not 
that ; and the idle rhyme that has only 
the lilt in it of a few dancing words, or 
the sparkle of a few trifling fancies, will 
defraud us of the time spent in reading 
it. Read pure, true poetry, as you would 
open your window on a morning in 
June ; as you would walk in a garden 
when the flowers are spread, or into the 
fields when the corn is ripe ; as you would 
go up to the mountains, or out on the 
shore of the sea. Go to it for the light 
and the gladness and the bloom of beauty 
and the larger horizons and the sweeter 
atmosphere you can find in it, for the 
rest and refreshment and revivifying of 
your souls. 

What is not read for the kinds of prac- 



64 HINTS AS TO READING 

tical knowledge that we call information 
is to be read for some such good to one's 
soul, if there is anything of worth in its 
print. Facts for our store of practical 
knowledge ; teachings and exercises for 
our understanding and reason ; illumin- 
ation and inspiration for the spiritual- 
ities that are in us ; wholesome stimulants 
for our lighter sensibilities, of fancy and 
of humor and the like, — these are the 
differing kinds of good for which we can 
go to books, and one or the other of 
which we should require them to supply. 
We know when they answer the demand ; 
generally we know when they fail. 
Teachings, illuminations, inspirations, 
are unmistakable experiences of mind ; 
but the wholesome gratifications of fancy 
and humor are not always so distinguish- 
able from the unwholesome, and it is 
there that the flood of modern fiction 
brings difficulty into the question of 
books. It is a difficulty which each 
reader must prepare to overcome, in the 



HINTS AS TO READING 65 

main, for himself. The discriminating 
sense — the feeling for what is good 
and for what is not good in the vast out- 
put of novel-writing at the present day 
— can be trained by exercising it on the 
undisputed classics of fiction that we in- 
herit from the past. One who reads Cer- 
vantes, Defoe, Scott, Dickens, Thack- 
eray, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, 
Erckmann-Chatrian, and others of the 
" old masters " of romance, till they have 
grooved habits of taste in his mind, is not 
likely to be cheated by any prentice- 
work, tricked out in later styles. 

And the more substantial literature, — 
the concrete literature of fact, — what 
shall I say of that? I am not here to 
urge people into this course of reading 
or that, dictated, as the counsel would 
naturally be, by my own inclinations of 
taste. There can be no kind or course 
of reading that is best for all. The bent 
of each mind is to be yielded to ; not 
wholly, but so far as will determine the 



66 HINTS AS TO READING 

main direction pursued : as to whether it 
shall be in history, or travel, or natural 
science, or social science, or philosophy, 
or art. Embarrassed as we are by the 
multitude and variety of things that claim 
attention in the world, we may, any of 
us, neglect philosophy, or the arts, or 
half the sciences ; but we must read some- 
thing of history, if we are to understand at 
all the stage on which we are acting, — 
the plot of the drama of life in which we 
are playing parts, — the world and the 
humanity to which we belong. And there 
are some suggestions on that point that I 
am glad to have an opportunity to make. 
First, I would say, give a little atten- 
tion — more than is given commonly - — 
to the background of history. It is one 
of the discoveries of recent times that 
there is such a thing as a background to 
history. Our ancestors knew of nothing 
behind the written annals of mankind, 
except the mist-cloud of fables from which 
they start. For us, however, there is 



HINTS AS TO READING 67 

accumulated already a wonderful body 
of prehistoric knowledge, more or less 
conjecturable and debatable, to be sure, 
but exceedingly significant, nevertheless, 
throwing flashes of light into the dim 
dawns of civilization and society. It is 
made up of a multitude of hints and frag- 
ments of fact, picked here and there out 
of the roots of old languages and the 
kitchen - heaps, cave -relics, and burial- 
mounds of primitive savage men, which 
are found to have surprising meanings 
when they are put together and com- 
pared and construed. To learn what we 
are able to learn from them, concerning 
the early divisions, relations, and move- 
ments of the tribes and races of mankind, 
before any kind of written record was 
made, or any name or personal figure 
appears, to produce for us the first dim 
picture of living history, is to acquire a 
most important ground of understanding 
for the recorded history that starts out 
from it later on. 



68 HINTS AS TO READING 

Even more interesting than this pre- 
historic background is what may be 
called the semi-historic background 
which lies between it and the fairly 
visible, well-lighted scenery of historic 
time. That, too, is a discovery of our 
own exploring age. Half a century ago 
the beginnings of the most dimly known 
history antedated our Christian era by 
little more than two thousand years. 
Now, as the result of inquisitive digging 
into the sand-covered ruins of ancient 
cities of the East, where civilization and 
letters had their birth, we are reading 
messages from more than twice that 
depth in the pre-Christian past ; and the 
story of the most ancient world has not 
only been extended but retold. It has 
been set before us in entirely new lights. 
In a thousand particulars, and in most 
of the meaning it had to modern minds, 
the old understanding of it is found to 
have been wrong. We who were read- 
ers of ancient history as it was written 



HINTS AS TO READING 69 

half a century ago are having to read it 
and learn it anew. The books that were 
classic in this department of history a 
generation ago — and they include the 
books of Biblical exposition and illustra- 
tion, as well as those in profane history 
— are as nearly worthless to-day as hon- 
est books can be made. Many readers, 
I fear, are not clearly conscious of that 
fact, and are wasting study on obsolete 
books. The parts of history much affected 
by these recent discoveries are those 
which touch primitive Egypt and west- 
ern Asia, and the legendary ages of the 
Greeks. Otherwise, the literature of an- 
cient history that was authoritative and 
good a generation ago is so, for the most 
part, now. 

This reminds me to repeat a word of 
counsel which I find frequent reason to 
urge : Take your history, as much as 
possible, from the greater writers, — 
from the historians who treat it in the 
largest way, with the amplest knowledge, 



7 o HINTS AS TO READING 

the most illuminating thought, the clear- 
est style. This may seem uncalled-for 
advice, but it is not. In my library ex- 
perience I have encountered many people 
who entertain a certain fear or distrust 
of the really great historical works. 
They want, as they say, something less 
learned, less elaborate, — something sim- 
ple, comprehensive, and plain. They 
think it will be easier to take instruction 
from one volume of a compiler than from 
half-a-dozen of a great original work. 
They make a very serious mistake. The 
history that is "writ large,' ' from full 
knowledge, is the history that can be 
made easy of apprehension and delight- 
fully interesting to the mind. Those who 
read it in compends and compilations 
lose its flavors ; lose the taste of life and 
living people in it; lose its organic whole- 
ness, — the logic and the lesson of it ; 
lose most, in fact, of what history is worth 
reading for, and do not get the simplicity 
and comprehensiveness they sought. 



HINTS AS TO READING 71 

At the same time, I am convinced that 
it is well to prepare for the large reading 
of any part of history by etching into the 
mind, as it were, a rough outline of the 
whole career of the greater races of man- 
kind, from Egypt and Babylon down to 
Britain and America, so that, whenever 
and wherever we fill in the details by 
fuller reading of this and that national 
history or individual biography, the parts 
will adjust themselves in their relative 
places and be correlated properly with 
each other. I do not mean by this to 
advise the general reader of history to 
cumber his mind with an extensive store 
of precise dates, but only that he should 
establish in his memory a fixed and firm 
association of the epochs, the important 
movements and the great characters that 
are contemporaneous, co-sequent and in- 
teractive in different regions of the world. 
To leave this chronological framework 
of historical knowledge to be pieced to- 
gether as one goes on with his larger 



72 HINTS AS TO READING 

reading seems to me a mistake. Better, 
I should say, sit down with a good epit- 
ome and make a business of building 
the main sections of it into the memory 
at once. 

It is not my purpose to commend 
writers or writings specifically ; I am 
simply urging fealty to the indisputably 
best, which do not need, as a rule, to be 
advertised. In name, at least, they are 
marked generally by common fame. If 
they are not known they can easily be 
ascertained ; and it is part of a reader's 
training to learn by sedulous inquiry 
what is the superlative literature in any 
field he may approach. 



IV 

THE MISSION AND THE MIS- 
SIONARIES OF THE BOOK 



THE MISSION AND THE MIS- 
SIONARIES OF THE BOOK. 1 

FOR the most part, that lifting of the 
human race in condition and character 
which we call civilization has been 
wrought by individual energies acting 
on simply selfish lines. When I say this, 
I use the term selfish in no sense that is 
necessarily mean, but only as indicating 
the unquestionable fact that men have 
striven, in the main, each for himself more 
than for one another, even in those striv- 
ings that have advanced the whole race. 
Within certain limits there is no discredit 
to human nature in the fact. A measure 
of selfishness is prescribed to man by 
the terms of his individuality and the 
conditions of his life. His only escape 

1 An Address at the University Convocation 
(State of New York), in June, 1896. 



76 THE MISSION AND THE 

from it is through exertions which he 
must employ at first in his own behalf, in 
order to win the independence and the 
power to be helpful to his fellows. So it 
seems to me quite impossible to imagine 
a process that would have worked out 
the civilization of the race otherwise than 
by the self-pushing energy that has im- 
pelled individual men to A plant, to build, 
to trade, to explore, to experiment, to 
think, to plan, primarily and immediately 
for their own personal advantage. 

But if the more active forces in civili^ 
zation are mainly from selfish springs, 
there are two, at least, which have nobler 
sources and a nobler historic part. One 
is the sympathetic impulse which repre- 
sents benevolence on its negative side, 
pained by the misfortunes of others and 
active to relieve them. In the second, 
which is more rare, we find benevolence 
of the positive kind. Its spring is in a 
purely generous feeling, which strongly 
moves one to communicate to others 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 77 

some good which is precious to him in 
his own experience of it. It is a feeling 
which may rise in different minds from 
different estimates of good, and be 
directed toward immediate objects that 
are unlike, but the disinterested motive 
and ultimate aim are unvarying, and it 
manifests in all cases the very noblest 
enthusiasm that humanity is capable of. 
There seems to be no name for it so true 
as that used when we speak of a mission- 
ary spirit, in efforts that aim at the shar- . 
ing of some greatly cherished good with 
people who have not learned that it is 
good. At the same time we must re- 
member that mere propagandisms put 
on the missionary garb without its spirit, 
and spuriously imitate its altruistic zeal ; 
and we must keep our definition in 
mind. 

There are always true missionaries in 
the world, laboring with equally pure 
hearts, though with minds directed to- 
ward many different ends of benefaction 



78 THE MISSION AND THE 

to their fellows. But only two objects — 
the spiritual good of mankind, contem- 
plated in religious beliefs, and the intel- 
lectual good, pursued in educational 
plans — have ever wakened the mission- 
ary spirit in a large, world-moving way. 
The supremely great epochs in human 
history are those few which have been 
marked by mighty waves of altruistic en- 
thusiasm, sweeping over the earth from 
sources of excitation found in one or the 
other of these two ideals of good. 

Naturally the first wakening was under 
the touch of beliefs which contemplate a 
more than earthly good ; and those be- 
liefs have moved the missionary spirit at 
all times with the greatest passion and 
power. But even the religious wakening 
was not an early event in history. I think 
I may safely say that no trace of it is to 
be found among the worshipers of remote 
antiquity. The Hebrew prophets never 
labored as dispensers of a personal bless- 
ing from their faith. It was for Israel, the 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 79 

national Israel, that they preached the 
claims and declared the requirements of 
the God of Israel. The priests of Osiris 
and Bel were still more indifferent to the 
interest of the worshiper in the worship 
of their gods, thinking only of the honor 
demanded by the gods themselves. So 
far as history will show, the first mission- 
ary inspiration would seem to have been 
brought into religion by Gotama, the 
Buddha, whose pure and exalted but 
enervating gospel of renunciation filled 
Asia with evangelists, and was carried to 
all peoples as the message of a hope of 
deliverance from the universal sorrow of 
the world. Then, centuries later, came 
the commission more divine which sent 
forth the apostles of Christianity to tell 
the story of the Cross and to bear the 
offer of salvation to every human soul. 
As religiously kindled, the missionary 
spirit has never burned with more fervor 
than it did in the first centuries of Chris- 
tian preaching; but nothing akin to it 



80 THE MISSION AND THE 

was set aflame in the smallest degree by 
any other eagerness of desire for the com- 
munication of a blessing or good to man- 
kind. Until we come to modern times, I 
can see no mark of the missionary mo- 
tive in any labor that was not religious. 
The one object which, in time, as I have 
said, came to rival the religious object 
as an inspiration of missionary work, the 
modern zeal for education, was late and 
slow in moving feelings to an unselfish 
depth. Enthusiasm for learning at the 
period of the renaissance was enthusiasm 
among the few who craved learning, and 
was expended mostly within their own 
circle. There was little thought of press- 
ing the good gift on the multitude who 
knew not their loss in the lack of it. The 
earliest great pleader for a common edu- 
cation of the whole people was Luther ; 
but the school was chiefly important in 
Luther's view as the nursery of the 
church and as a health-bringer to the 
state, and he labored for it more as a 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 81 

means to religious and political ends than 
as an end in itself. Almost a century 
after Luther there appeared one whom 
Michelet has called " the first evangelist 
of modern pedagogy," John Amos Co- 
menius, the Moravian. The same thought 
of him, as an evangelist, is expressed by 
the historian Raumer, who says : " Co- 
menius is a grand and venerable figure 
of sorrow. Wandering, persecuted and 
homeless during the terrible and desolat- 
ing Thirty Years' War, he yet never de- 
spaired, but with enduring truth and 
strong in faith he labored unweariedly to 
prepare youth by a better education for a 
better future. He labored for them with 
a zeal and love worthy of the chief of the 
Apostles." And the education for which 
Comenius labored was no less, in his own 
words, than "the teaching to all men 
of all the subjects of human concern." 
Proclaiming his educational creed at an- 
other time, he said : "I undertake an 
organization of schools whereby all the 



82 THE MISSION AND THE 

youth maybe instructed save those to 
whom God has denied intelligence, and 
instructed in all those things which make 
man wise, good and holy." 

Here, then, had arisen the first true mis- 
sionary of common teaching, who bore 
the invitation to learning as a gospel 
proffered to all childhood and all youth, 
and who strove in its behalf with apostolic 
zeal. The period of the active labors of 
Comenius was before and a little after 
the middle of the seventeenth century. 
He made some impression upon the ideas 
and the educational methods of his time, 
but Europe generally was cold to his 
enthusiasm. In one small corner of it, 
alone, there was a people already pre- 
pared for and already beginning to real- 
ize his inspiring dreams of universal edu- 
cation. That was Holland, where the 
state, even in the midst of its struggle 
for an independent existence, was assum- 
ing the support of common schools and 
attempting to provide them for every 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 83 

child. In that one spot the true mission- 
ary leaven in education was found work- 
ing while the seventeenth century was 
still young, and from Holland it would 
seem to have been carried to America 
long before the fermentation was really 
felt in any other land. 

Elsewhere in the Old World, if Come- 
nius found any immediate successor in the 
new field of missionary labor which he 
had practically discovered and opened, 
it was the Abbe La Salle, founder of the 
great teaching order of the Christian 
Brothers. But the zeal kindled by La 
Salle, which has burned even to the pre- 
sent day, was essentially religious in its 
aims and dedicated to the service of his 
church. The spirit in common teach- 
ing still waited generally for that which 
would make a secular saving faith of it, 
urgent, persisting, not to be denied or 
escaped from. The world at large made 
some slow progress toward better things 
in it ; schools were increased in number 



84 THE MISSION AND THE 

and improved ; Jesuits, Jansenists, Ora- 
torians and other teaching orders in 
the Roman Church labored more intelli- 
gently ; middle-class education in Eng- 
land and other countries received more 
attention. But the conscience of society 
in general was satisfied with the open- 
ing of the school to those who came with 
money in their hands and knocked at its 
door. There was no thought yet of stand- 
ing in the door and crying out to the 
moneyless and to the indifferent, bidding 
them come. Far less was there thought 
of going out into the highways and 
hedges to bring them in. Another cen- 
tury of time was needed and a long 
line of apostolic teachers, agitators, and 
administrators, like Pestalozzi, Father 
Girard, Frobel, Humboldt, Brougham, 
Horace Mann, to inspire that feeling for 
education which warms the western na- 
tions of the world at last : the feeling for 
education as a supreme good in itself, not 
merely as a bread-making or a money- 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 85 

making instrument ; not merely for giv- 
ing arithmetic to the shop-keeper, or 
bookkeeping to the clerk, or even politi- 
cal opinions to the citizen ; not merely 
for supplying preachers to the pulpit, or 
physicians to the sick-room, or lawyers 
to the bench and bar ; but in and of and 
for its own sake, as a good to humanity 
which surpasses every other good, save 
one. This is what I call the missionary 
spirit in education, and it has so far been 
wakened in the world that we expect and 
demand it in the teaching work of our 
time, and when we do not have it, we are 
cheated by its counterfeit. 

But this zeal for education was ani- 
mated in most communities sooner than 
the thought needed for its wise direction. 
There was a time not long ago when it 
expended itself in schoolrooms and col- 
leges and was satisfied. To have laid be- 
nignant hands on the children of the gen- 
eration and pushed them, with a kindly 
coercion, through some judicious cur- 



86 THE MISSION AND THE 

riculum of studies was thought to be 
enough. That limited conception of edu- 
cation as a common good sufficed for a 
time, but not long. The impulse which 
carried public sentiment to that length 
was sure to press questions upon it that 
would reach farther yet. " Have we ar- 
rived," it began to ask, "at the end for 
which our public schools are the means ? 
We have provided broadly and liberally 
— for what ? For teaching our children to 
read their own language in print, to trace 
it in written signs, to construct it in gram- 
matical forms, to be familiar with arith- 
metical rules, to know the standards and 
divisions of weight and measure, to form 
a notion of the surface features of the 
earth and to be acquainted with the 
principal names that have been given to 
them, to remember a few chief facts in 
the past of their own country. But these 
are only keys which we expect them to 
use in their acquisition of knowledge, 
rather than knowledge itself. When they 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 87 

quit the school with these wonderful keys 
of alphabet and number in their posses- 
sion, they are only in the vestibule cham- 
bers of education. Can we leave them 
there, these children and youth of our 
time, to find as best they may, or not find 
at all, the treasuries we would have them 
unlock?" To ask the question was to 
answer it. Once challenged to a larger 
thought of education, the missionary spirit 
of the age rose boldly in its demands. 
The free school, the academy, the college 
even, grew in importance when looked 
at in the larger view, but they were seen 
to be not enough. They were seen to 
be only blessed openings in the way to 
knowledge, — garlanded gates, ivory 
portals, golden doors, but passage-ways 
only, after all, to knowledge beyond 
them. And the knowledge to which they 
led, while much and of many kinds may 
need to be gleaned in the open fields of 
life, out of living observations and expe- 
riences, yet mainly exists as a measure- 



88 THE MISSION AND THE 

less store of accumulated savings from 
the experience and observation of all the 
generations that have lived and died, re- 
corded in writing and preserved in print. 
There, then, in the command and posses- 
sion of that great store, the end of edu- 
cation was seen to be most nearly real- 
ized ; and so the free public library was 
added to the free public school. 

But strangely enough, when that was 
first done, there happened the same halt- 
ing of spirit that had appeared in the free 
public school. To have collected a li- 
brary of books, and to have set its doors 
open to all comers, was assumed to be 
the fulfillment of duty in the matter. The 
books waited for readers to seek them. 
The librarian waited for inquirers to press 
their way to him. No one thought of out- 
spreading the books of the library like a 
merchant's wares, to win the public eye 
to them. None thought of trying by any 
means to rouse an appetite for books in 
minds not naturally hungry for learning 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 89 

or poetry or the thinking of other men. 
So the free or the nearly free public li- 
braries, for a time, wrought no great good 
for education beyond a circle in which 
the energy of the desire to which they 
answered was most independent of any 
public help. 

But this stage of passive existence in 
the life of the free public library had no 
long duration. Soon the missionary pas- 
sion began to stir men here and there in 
the library field, as it had stirred teach- 
ers in the schools before. One by one, 
the inspiration of their calling began to 
burn in their hearts. They saw with new 
eyes the greatness of the trust confided 
to them, and they rose to a new sense 
of the obligations borne with it. No 
longer a mere keeper, custodian, watch- 
man, set over dumb treasures to hold 
them safe, the librarian now took active 
functions upon himself and became 
the minister of his trust, commanded by 
his own feelings and by many incen- 



9 o THE MISSION AND THE 

tives around him to make the most in 
all possible ways of the library as an in- 
fluence for good. The new spirit thus 
brought into library work spread quickly, 
as a beneficent epidemic, from New Eng- 
land, where its appearance was first no- 
tably marked, over America and Great 
Britain and into all English lands, and 
is making its way more slowly in other 
parts of the world. 

The primary effort to which it urged 
librarians and library trustees was that 
toward bettering the introduction of 
books to readers ; toward making them 
known, in the first instance, with a due 
setting forth of what they are and what 
they offer; then toward putting them 
in right relations with one another, by 
groupings according to subject and lit- 
erary form and by cross-bindings of 
reference ; then toward establishing the 
easiest possible guidance to them, both 
severally and in their groups, for all seek- 
ers, whether simple or learned. When 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 91 

serious attention had once been given to 
these matters there was found to be need 
in them of a measure of study, of experi- 
ment, of inventive ingenuity, of individ- 
ual and collective experience, of practical 
and philosophical attainments, that had 
never been suspected before. These dis- 
coveries gave form to a conception of 
"library science," of a department of 
study that is entitled to scientific rank 
by the importance of its results, the pre- 
cision of its methods, the range of its de- 
tails. The quick development of the new 
science, within the few years that have 
passed since the first thought of it came 
into men's minds, is marked by the rise 
of flourishing library schools and classes 
in all parts of the United States, east and 
west. 

For more efficiency in their common 
work, the reformers of the library were 
organized at an early day. The American 
Library Association on this side of the 
sea and the Library Association of the 



92 THE MISSION AND THE 

United Kingdom on the other side, with 
journals giving voice to each, proved pow- 
erful in their unifying effect. Ideas were 
exchanged and experiences compared. 
Each was taught by the successes or 
warned by the failures of his neighbors. 
What each one learned by investigation 
or proved by trial became the property 
of every other. The mutual instruction 
that came about was equaled only by 
the working cooperation which followed. 
Great tasks, beyond the power of indi- 
viduals, and impossible as commercial 
undertakings, because promising no pe- 
cuniary reward, were planned and labori- 
ously performed by the union of many 
coworkers, widely scattered in the world, 
but moved by one disinterested aim. 
From one hundred and twenty-two libra- 
ries, in that mode of alliance, there was 
massed the labor which indexed the whole 
body of general magazine literature, thus 
sweeping the dust from thousands of vol- 
umes that had been practically useless 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 93 

before, bringing the invaluable miscel- 
lany of their contents into daily, definite 
service, by making its subjects known 
and easily traced. The same work of 
cooperative indexing was next carried 
into the indeterminate field of general 
miscellaneous books. By still broader co- 
operation, a selection of books was made 
from the huge mass of all literature, with 
sittings and resiftings, to be a standard 
of choice and a model of cataloguing for 
small new libraries. And now topical lists 
on many subjects are being prepared for 
the guidance of readers by specialists in 
each subject, with notes to describe and 
value the books named. The possibili- 
ties of cooperation in library work are 
just beginning to be realized, and the 
great tasks accomplished already by it 
will probably look small when compared 
with undertakings to come hereafter. 

But, after all, it is the individual work 
in the libraries which manifests most dis- 
tinctly the new spirit of the time. The 



94 -HE MISSION AND THE 

perfected cataloguing, which opens paths 
for the seeker from every probable start- 
ing-point of inquiry, not only to books, 
but into the contents of books ; the mul- 
tiplied reading lists and reference lists 
on questions and topics of the day, which 
are quick to answer a momentary inter- 
est in the public mind and direct it to 
the best sources for its satisfaction ; the 
annotated bulletins of current literature, 
which announce and value as far as 
practicable, by some word of competent 
criticism, the more important publications 
of each month; the opening of book- 
shelves to readers, to which libraries are 
tending as far as their constitution and 
their circumstances will permit ; the evo- 
lution of the children's reading-room, now 
become a standard feature to be provided 
for in every new building design, and to 
be striven for in buildings of an older 
pattern ; the invention of traveling libra- 
ries and home libraries ; the increasing 
provision made in library service for 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOiv 5 

helping students and inquirers to pur- 
sue their investigations and make their 
searches ; the increasing cooperation of 
libraries and schools, with the growing 
attraction of teachers and pupils toward 
the true literature of their subjects of 
study, and the waning tyranny of the 
dessicated text-book ; in all these things 
there is the measure of an influence which 
was hardly beginning to be felt a quarter 
of a century ago. 

I have named last among the fruits of 
this potent influence the cooperation of 
libraries and schools, not because it stands 
least in the list, but because the whole 
missionary inspiration from every stand- 
point of solicitude for the educational 
good of mankind is united and culminated 
in it and is doing its greatest work. The 
missionary teacher and the missionary 
librarian come together in these new ar- 
rangements, working no longer one in 
the steps of the other, — one carrying 
forward the education which the other 



96 THE MISSION AND THE 

has begun, — but hand in hand and side 
by side, leading children from the earliest 
age into the wonderful and beautiful book- 
world of poetry, legend, story, nature- 
knowledge, or science, time-knowledge 
or history, life-knowledge or biography, 
making it dear and familiar to them in 
the impressionable years within which 
their tastes are formed. The school alone, 
under common conditions, can do no- 
thing of that. On the contrary, its text 
books, as known generally in the past, 
have been calculated to repel the young 
mind. They have represented to it little 
but the dry task of rote-learning and 
recitation. They have brought to it no- 
thing of the flavor of real literature, nor 
any of that rapturous delight from an 
inner sense of rhythmic motions which 
real literature can give : neither the 
dancing step, nor the swinging march, 
nor the rush as with steeds, nor the lift 
and sweep as with wings, which even a 
child may be made to feel in great poetry 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 97 

and in noble prose, and which once expe- 
rienced is a beguiling charm forever. 
The whole tendency of the text-book 
teaching of school is toward deadening 
the young mind to that feeling for liter- 
ature, and alienating it from books by a 
prejudice born of wrong impressions at 
the beginning. Just so far as the school 
reader, the school geography, the school 
history and their fellow compends, are 
permitted to remain conspicuous in a 
child's thought during his early years, as 
representative of the books which he will 
be admonished by and by to read, so far 
he will be put into an opposition never 
easy to overcome. 

The tenderest years of childhood are 
the years of all others for shaping a pure 
intellectual taste and creating a pure in- 
tellectual thirst which only a noble liter- 
ature can satisfy in the end. We have 
come at last to the discernment of that 
pregnant fact, and our schemes of edu- 
cation for the young are being recon- 



98 THE MISSION AND THE 

structed accordingly. There is no longer 
the division of labor between school and 
library which seemed but a little time ago 
to be marked out so plainly. Schools are 
not to make readers for libraries, nor are 
libraries to wait for readers to come to 
them out of the schools. The school and 
the world of books which it makes known 
to him are to be identified in the child's 
mind. There is to be no distinction in 
his memory between reading as an art 
learned and reading as a delight dis- 
covered. The art and the use of the art 
are to be one simultaneous communica- 
tion to him. 

That is the end contemplated in the 
cooperative work of libraries and schools, 
which, recent in its beginning, has made 
great advances already, and which espe- 
cially appeals to what I have called the 
missionary enthusiasm in both libraries 
and schools. It contemplates what seems 
to be the truest ideal of teaching ever 
shaped in thought: of teaching not as 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 99 

educating, but as setting the young in 
the way of education ; as starting them 
on a course of self-culture which they 
will pursue to the end of their lives, with 
no willingness to turn back. The high- 
est ideal of education is realized in that 
life-long pursuit of it, and the success 
of any school is measured, not by the 
little portion of actual learning which 
its students take out of it, but by the 
persisting strength of the impulse to 
know and to think, which they carry 
from the school into their later lives. 

But there are people who may assent 
to all that is said of education in this life- 
lasting view of it, who will deny that there 
is a question in it of books. " We," they 
say, " find more for our instruction in life 
than in books. The reality of things in- 
terests us more and teaches us more than 
the report and description of them by 
others. We study men among men and 
God's works in the midst of them. We 
prefer to take knowledge at first hand, 

L OF C. 



ioo THE MISSION AND THE 

from nature and from society, rather than 
second-handedly, out of a printed page. 
Your book- wisdom is from the closet and 
for closet-use. It is not the kind needed 
in a busy and breezy world." Well, there 
is a half-truth in this which must not be 
ignored. To make everything of books 
in the development of men and women 
is a greater mistake, perhaps, than to 
make nothing of them. For life has teach- 
ings, and nature out of doors has teach- 
ings, for which no man, if he misses them, 
can find compensation in books. We can 
say that frankly to the contemner of 
books and we yield no ground in doing 
so ; for then we turn upon him and say : 
" Your life, sir, to which you look for all 
the enlightenment of soul and mind that 
you receive, is a brief span of a few tens 
of years ; the circle of human acquain- 
tances in which you are satisfied to make 
your whole study of mankind is a little 
company of a few hundred men and 
women, at the most ; the natural world 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 101 

from which you think to take sufficient 
lessons with your unassisted eyes is made 
up of some few bits of city streets and 
country lanes and seaside sands. What 
can you, sir, know of life, compared with 
the man who has had equal years of 
breath and consciousness with you, and 
who puts with that experience some large, 
wide knowledge of seventy centuries of 
human history in the whole round world 
besides ? What can you know of man- 
kind and human nature compared with 
the man who meets and talks with as 
many of his neighbors in the flesh as 
yourself, and who, beyond that, has com- 
panionship and communion of mind with 
the kingly and queenly ones of all the 
generations that are dead? What can 
you learn from nature compared with 
him who has Darwin and Dana and Hux- 
ley and Tyndall and Gray for his tutors 
when he walks abroad, and who, besides 
the home-rambling which he shares with 
you, can go bird-watching with John 



102 THE MISSION AND THE 

Burroughs up and down the Atlantic 
states, or roaming with Thoreau in Maine 
woods, or strolling with Richard Jefferies 
in English lanes and fields?" 

Truth is, the bookless man does not 
understand his own loss. He does not 
know the leanness in which his mind 
is kept by want of the food which he 
rejects. He does not know what starving 
of imagination and of thought he has 
inflicted upon himself. He has suffered 
his interest in the things which make up 
God's knowable universe to shrink until 
it reaches no farther than his eyes can 
see and his ears can hear. The books 
which he scorns are the telescopes and 
reflectors and reverberators of our intel- 
lectual life, holding in themselves a hun- 
dred magical powers for the overcoming 
of space and time, and for giving the 
range of knowledge which belongs to a 
really cultivated mind. There is no equal 
substitute for them. There is nothing else 
which will so break for us the poor 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 103 

hobble of every-day sights and sounds 
and habits and tasks, by which our think- 
ing and feeling are prone to be tethered 
to a little worn round. 

Some may think, perhaps, that news- 
papers should be named with books as 
sharing this high office. In truth, it 
ought to be possible to rank the news- 
paper with the book as an instrument of 
culture. Equally in truth, it is not pos- 
sible to do so, except in the case of some 
small number. The true public journal 
— diary of the world — which is actually 
a news-paper and not a gossip-paper, is 
most powerfully an educator, cultivator, 
broadener of the minds of those who read 
it. It lifts them out of their petty per- 
sonal surroundings, and sets them in the 
midst of all the great movements of the 
time on every continent. It makes them 
spectators and judges of everything that 
happens or is done, demands opinions 
from them, extorts their sympathy and 
moves them morally to wrath or admi- 



104 THE MISSION AND THE 

ration. In a word, it produces daily, in 
their thought and feeling, a thousand 
large relations with their fellow men of 
every country and race, with noble re- 
sults of the highest and truest culti- 
vation. 

But the common so-called newspaper 
of the present day, which is a mere rag- 
picker of scandal and gossip, searching 
the gutters and garbage-barrels of the 
whole earth for every tainted and unclean 
scrap of personal misdoing or mishap 
that can be dragged to light ; the so-called 
newspaper which interests itself, and 
which labors to interest its readers, in the 
trivialities and ignoble occurrences of the 
day — in the prize fights, and mean pre- 
liminaries of prize fights, the boxing 
matches, the ball games, the races, the 
teas, the luncheons, the receptions, the 
dresses, the goings and comings and 
private doings of private persons — 
making the most in all possible ways of 
all petty things and low things, while 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 105 

treating grave matters with levity and 
impertinence, with what effect is such 
a newspaper read? I do not care to 
say. If I spoke my mind I might strike 
harshly at too many people whose read- 
ing is confined to such sheets. I will 
venture only so much remark as this : 
that I would prefer absolute illiteracy 
for a son or daughter of mine, total in- 
ability to spell a printed word, rather 
than that he or she should be habitually 
a reader of the common newspapers of 
America to-day, and a reader of nothing 
better. 

I could say the same of many books. 
So far, in speaking of books, I have been 
taking for granted that you will under- 
stand me to mean, not everything with- 
out discrimination which has the form of 
a book, but only the true literature which 
worthily bears that printed form. For if 
we must give the name to all printed 
sheets, folded and stitched together in a 
certain mode, then it becomes necessary 



106 THE MISSION AND THE 

to qualify the use we make of the name. 
Then we must sweep out of the question 
vast numbers of books which belong to 
literature no more than a counterfeit 
dollar belongs to the money of the coun- 
try. They are counterfeits in literature, 
— base imitations of the true book ; that 
is their real character. Readers may be 
cheated by them precisely as buyers and 
sellers may be cheated by the spurious 
coin, and the detection and rejection of 
them are effected by identically the same 
process of scrutiny and comparison. 
Every genuine book has a reason for its 
existence, in something of value which it 
brings to the reader. That something 
may be information, it may be in ideas, 
it may be in moral stimulations, it may be 
in wholesome emotions, it may be in gifts 
to the imagination, or to the fancy, or to 
the sense of humor, or to the humane 
sympathies, or indefinably to the whole 
conscious contentment of the absorbing 
mind ; but it will always be a fact which 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 107 

those who make themselves familiar 
with good and true books can never 
mistake. Whether they find it in a book 
of history, or of travel, or of biography, 
or of piety, or of science, or of poetry, 
or of nonsense (for there are good books 
of nonsense, like "Alice in Wonder- 
land," for example), they will infallibly 
recognize the stamp of genuineness upon 
it. The readers who are cheated by 
base and worthless books are the readers 
who will not give themselves an expert 
knowledge of good books, as they might 
easily do. 

Here, then, opens one of the greater 
missionary fields of the public library. 
To push the competition of good books 
against worthless books, making readers 
of what is vulgar and flat acquainted 
with what is wholesome and fine, is a 
work as important as the introduction 
of books among people who have never 
read at all. There is a theory which has 
some acceptance, that any reading is 



108 THE MISSION AND THE 

better than no reading. It rests on the 
assumption that an appetite for letters 
once created, even by the trash of the 
press, will either refine its own taste or 
else will have prepared a susceptibility 
to literary influences which could not 
otherwise exist. Those who hold this 
doctrine have confidence that a young 
devourer of dime novels, for example, 
may be led on an ascending plane 
through Castlemon, Optic, Alger, Mayne 
Reid, Henty, Verne, Andersen, De Foe, 
Scott, Homer, Shakspere, more easily 
than a boy or girl who runs away from 
print of every sort can be won into any 
similar path. For my own part, I fear the 
theory is unsafe for working. It will prob- 
ably prove true in some cases ; I am 
quite sure that it will prove dangerously 
false in many others. There are kinds 
of habit and appetite in reading which 
seem to be as deep-rooted in unhealthy 
states of mind and brain as the appetite 
for opium or alcohol. They grow up 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 109 

among the habitual readers of such news- 
papers as I have been speaking of, and 
equally among readers of the slop-shop 
novels, vulgar or vile, with which the 
world is flooded in this age of print. The 
newspaper appetite or the trash-novel 
appetite, once fastened on the brain of 
its victim, is not often unloosed. It 
masters all other inclinations, permits no 
other taste or interest to be wakened. 
The stuff which produces it is as danger- 
ous to tamper with as any other dream- 
and stupor-making narcotic. To bait 
readers with it, expecting to lure them 
on to better literature, is to run a grave 
risk of missing the end and realizing 
only the mischiefs of the temptation. 

Far safer will it be to hold the public 
library as strictly as can be done to the 
mission of good books. And that is a 
vague prescription. How are " good 
books" to be defined? — since their 
goodness is of many degrees. The mere 
distinction between good and bad in lit- 



J 



no THE MISSION AND THE 

erature I believe to be recognized easily, 
as I have said, by every person who has 
tasted the good and whose intellectual 
sense has been cultivated by it to even a 
small extent. But between the supremely 
good and that which is simply not bad, 
there are degrees beyond counting. From 
Sardou to Shakspere, from Trumbull to 
Homer, from Roe to Thackeray, from 
Tupper to Marcus Aurelius, from Tal- 
mage to Thomas a Kempis or Thomas 
Fuller, from Jacob Abbott to Edward 
Gibbon, the graduation of quality is 
beyond exact marking by any critical 
science. How shall we draw lines to dis- 
tinguish the negatively from the posi- 
tively good in letters ? We simply can- 
not. We can only lay down loose lines 
and put behind them the never relaxing 
spring of one elastic and always prac- 
ticable rule : Strive unceasingly for the 
best. Give all the opportunities to the 
best literature of every class. Give front 
places on all possible occasions to the 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 1 1 1 

great writers, the wise writers, the learned 
writers, the wholesome writers ; keep 
them always in evidence ; contrive in- 
troductions for them ; make readers fa- 
miliar with their standing and rank. 
There is little else to be done. The pub- 
lic library would be false to its mission 
if it did not exclude books that are posi- 
tively bad, either through vice or vul- 
garity ; but much beyond that it cannot 
easily go. Happily, it cannot force the 
best literature upon its public ; for if it 
could, the effect would be lost. But it 
can recommend the best, with an insist- 
ing urgency that will prevail in the 
end. 

I am by nature an optimist. Things as 
they are in the world look extremely 
disheartening to me, but I think I can 
see forces at work which will powerfully 
change them before many generations 
have passed. Among such forces, the 
most potent in my expectation is that 
which acts from the free public library. 



ii2 THE MISSION AND THE 

Through its agency, in my belief, there 
will come a day — it may be a distant 
day, but it will come — when the large 
knowledge, the wise thinking, the fine 
feeling, the amplitude of spirit that are in 
the greater literatures, will have passed 
into so many minds that they will rule 
society democratically, by right of num- 
bers. I see no encouragement to hope 
that the culture which lifts men from gen- 
eration to generation, little by little, to 
higher levels and larger visions of things, 
will ever be made universal. Under the 
best circumstances which men can bring 
about, nature seems likely to deny to a 
considerable class of unfortunates the 
capacity, either mentally, or morally, or 
both, for refinement and elevation. But 
if that be true at all, it cannot be true of 
any formidable number. Among the pro- 
gressive races, the majority of men and 
women are unquestionably of the stuff 
and temper out of which anything fine 
in soul and strong in intellect can be 



MISSIONARIES OF THE BOOK 1 13 

made, if not in one generation, then in 
two, or three, or ten, by the continual 
play upon them of influences from the 
finer souls and greater minds of their own 
times and of the past. It is not by nature 
but by circumstance, heredity itself being 
an offspring of circumstance, that light is 
shut from the greater part of those who 
walk the earth with darkened minds. 
Man is so far the master of circumstance 
that he can turn and diffuse the light 
almost as he will, and his will to make 
the illumination of the few common to the 
many is now beyond dispute. All the 
movements that I have reviewed are 
marks of its progressive working. It 
translates into active energy that desire 
for others of the good most precious to 
one's self, which is the finest and noblest 
feeling possible to human nature. All 
the forces of selfishness that race men 
against one another, from goal to goal 
of a simply scientific civilization, would 
fail to bring about this supreme end of 



ii 4 MISSION OF THE BOOK 

a common culture for the race. Nothing 
but the missionary inspiration could 
give a reasonable promise of it. Let 
us thank God for the souls He has put 
into men, having that capability of help- 
fulness to one another. 



V 

GOOD AND EVIL FROM THE 
PRINTING PRESS 



GOOD AND EVIL FROM THE 
PRINTING PRESS 1 

From the first movement of its lever, the 
Press brought an immeasurable new 
force into modern civilization. Its earli- 
est service was rendered mainly to schol- 
arship, in the diffusion of the classic writ- 
ings of antiquity, but very quickly it was 
drawn into a more popular arena, and 
gave a voice to the appeals of religion, 
a weapon to theological dispute. The 
rapidity of its work at that early period 
is shown by the rapidity of the spread of 
the ideas of the Reformation, for which 
it was a vehicle that could not have been 
spared. Between Gutenberg's death and 
Luther's birth there were only fifteen 

1 From an address at the meeting of the Ameri- 
can Library Association, 1896. 



n8 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 

years ; but the reformer found already an 
extensive public prepared to be reached 
and acted on by the printed tract and 
book. That the intellectual horizons of 
life were widened from that day is one of 
the plainest historical facts. Its skies, 
too, were lifted to a loftier arch, and it 
was made larger in all ways, by energies 
which the new instrument of knowledge 
set free. For then, and long afterward, 
there was earnestness in the splendid 
work of type and press. Some kind of 
purpose — not always good, or wise, or 
true, or wholesome, but something that 
had thought behind it, or fact, or im- 
agination, or emotion, — was in most 
things that received the printer's stamp. 
Through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and 
eighteenth centuries there are not many 
shallows in the stream of print. 

At the opening of the nineteenth cen- 
tury the book and the tract remained still 
the principal products of the Press, and 
the custody or conveyance of ideas was 



THE PRINTING PRESS 119 

still its chief employ. It had engaged 
itself already in a lighter service, as the 
messenger of news ; but that was a mere 
apprenticeship, not yet promising of 
much effect. So long as the gathering 
of news depended on the vehicles of the 
olden time, it was too slow and too 
limited a work to stir the world. But 
when the energy of steam and the speed 
of lightning were offered to the News- 
paper Press, that passed suddenly to the 
front of all the influences acting on man- 
kind. School, pulpit, and platform were 
left behind it. The mastery of our later 
civilization, in the moral moulding of it, 
if not more, was soon seen to have been 
grasped by adventurers in a new com- 
merce, which made merchandise of pass- 
ing history and marketed the tidings of 
the day. 

Meantime, the common school had 
been doing its work far and wide, and 
most men and women of the leading 
races had learned to read. That is to say, 



120 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 

they had learned to decipher language 
put into print, or had learned reading as 
a simple art ; but the educational use — 
the culture use — of the art was some- 
thing which no majority of them had yet 
acquired. To make readers of them 
practically as well as potentially, another 
agency was wanted beyond that of the 
school, and the newspaper came appar- 
ently to supply it. Books and libraries 
of books were not equal to the service 
required. Perhaps it will always be im- 
possible for book literature of any kind 
to push its way or to be pushed into the 
hands of the people with the penetrating 
energy that carries newspapers to all 
homes. At all events, the common school, 
making possible readers, and the news- 
paper inviting them to read, arrived 
together, at a conjunction which might 
have seemed to be a happy miracle for 
the universalizing of culture in the 
Western world. The opportunity that 
came then into the hands of the conductors 



THE PRINTING PRESS 121 

of the news press, with the new powers 
that had been given them, has never been 
paralleled in human history. They might 
have been gardeners of Eden and planters 
of a new paradise on the earth ; for its 
civilization was put into their hands to 
be made what they would have it to be. 
If it could have been possible then to deal 
with newspapers as other educational 
agencies are dealt with ; to invest them 
with definite moral responsibilities to the 
public ; to take away from them their 
commercial origin and their mercenary 
motive ; to inspire them with disinterested 
aims ; to endow them as colleges are 
endowed ; to man them for their work as 
colleges are manned, with learning and 
tried capacity in the editorial chairs ; — ■ 
if that could have been possible, what im- 
aginable degree of common culture might 
not Europe and America be approaching 
to-day ? As it is, we are trying to explain 
to ourselves a condition of society which 
alarms and shames all who think of it 



122 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 

Nevertheless, during the first few dec- 
ades of the modern news market, — as 
it took shape, we will say, early in the 
eighteen-forties, — the influence of the 
newspapers was generally more whole- 
some than otherwise. Readers of them 
were made acquainted with things worth 
the knowing. The world and their life 
in it, as parts of a great whole, were 
widened to them wholesomely and genu- 
inely, and by much more than the larger 
knowledge of it which they gathered 
from day to day. The widening of the 
sympathetic life of mankind, meaning 
thereby an increment and expansion of 
all the feelings which press men into 
closer and warmer relations, and prepare 
them for truer understandings of each 
other, was the supreme effect upon them 
of the daily world-history that began to 
be reported to them in the period named. 

But a time came when one arose 
among the brokers of the news market 
who made a discovery which proved 



THE PRINTING PRESS 123 

nearly fatal to the character and dignity 
of journalism. He discerned, that is, with 
low shrewdness, an unbounded possi- 
bility of degradation in human curiosity 
and vanity, as opening a great, vulgar, 
and profitable field for unscrupulous ex- 
ploitations of the newspaper press. He 
was not long alone in the enjoyment of 
his ignoble discovery. One by one, the 
traffickers in news yielded to the cor- 
rupting example, or were driven by less 
scrupulous competitors into the ranks of 
the new journalism ; till, to-day, we can 
count on the fingers of not many hands 
the important newspapers (in America, 
at least) that will give us real and 
clean news, and not force us to strain 
some meagre pickings of it out of a 
sickening mixture of trivialities, mor- 
bidities, vulgarities, impertinences, and 
worse. 

Here and there we may still bow with 
respect before a newspaper over which 
the responsible editor has kept his sov- 



124 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 

ereignty. In most instances he has been 
deposed, and the irresponsible reporter 
reigns in his place, — master of the awful 
power of the Press, — chief educator of 
his generation, — pervading genius of 
the civilization of his time. Trained to 
look at all things, in heaven above or 
in the earth beneath, with an eye single 
to the glory of big type, he sees them 
in one aspect. The great and the little, 
the good and the bad, the sweet and the 
foul, the momentous and the trivial, 
the tragic and the comic, the public and 
the sacredly private, are of one stuff in 
his eyes, — mere colorings of a fabric of 
life which Time weaves for him to slit 
and to slash with his merciless, indiffer- 
ent shears. And so, with little prejudice 
and small partiality between things high 
and low, he makes the daily literature on 
which most of us feed and tincture our 
minds. It is a monotoned literature, and 
its one note is flippancy : the flippant 
headline, the flippant paragraph, the flip- 



THE PRINTING PRESS 125 

pant narrative, the flippant comment. To 
jest at calamity, to be jocular with crime, 
to sting personal misfortune with a smart 
impertinence or cap it with a slang 
phrase ; to be respectful and serious to- 
ward nothing else so much as toward the 
gayeties of the world of fashion and the 
gaming of the world of sport, appear to 
be the perfections of the art to which he 
is trained. 

And no careful observer can fail to see 
that the degradation of the newspaper 
press is degrading most of the voices of 
the time. The shallow flippancy which 
began in journalism is affecting litera- 
ture in every popular form. More and 
more the air is filled with thin strains 
of wordy song ; but the deep-toned mel- 
odies of thoughtful poetry are dying 
out of it fast. Rhymers multiply apace, 
and the reporter inspires them. They 
worship the god Novelty with him, and 
Apollo is forgotten. They exercise a 
nimble fancy on tight-ropes and trapezes 



126 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 

of metrical invention, in performances 
that are curious to behold. 

The art- world, too, is infected with the 
irresponsible levity which had its genesis 
in the newspaper. Half of the men and 
women who paint pictures are doing so 
with scornful denials of any thoughtful 
purpose in their work. "Art for Art's 
sake" is the senseless formula of their 
contempt for the reverent service of im- 
agination and reason which Art could 
command from them if Art knew them 
at all. 

On all the commoner sides of its life 
there is singularly and lamentably a 
shallowness, a flippancy, a vulgarity, in 
the present age. Who can dispute the 
fact ? And what is plainer than the causes 
we can find, in that precipitate, enormous 
expansion and acceleration of communi- 
cation in the world which has occurred 
within our time, acting on civilized so- 
ciety, and most powerfully in America, 
in three modes, namely : (i) an increas- 



THE PRINTING PRESS 127 

ing excitement of commerce, following 
closely upon the loss from it of all its 
older incidents of discovery and adven- 
ture, producing, for the time, a vulgariz- 
ing mercenary nakedness ; (2) an abrupt 
plunge for the freer peoples from theo- 
retical into practical democracy, conse- 
quent on the sudden creation of tremen- 
dous new agencies of combination and 
organization, and the generating of a 
public opinion that is a new and untrained 
force in the world ; (3) the evolution of 
the modern newspaper and its speedy 
corruption, from the mighty servant of 
civilization that it ought to be into the 
busy pander of every vulgarity that the 
new conditions can feed. 

But this is not the end of the story. 
These are but early effects, — effects in 
their beginning, from great enduring 
causes, the operation of which they can- 
not exhaust. If the common mind of the 
age is trivialized and vulgarized by its 
newspapers and its commerce, it is being 



128 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 

pricked, at the same time, to a new 
alertness, even by the worst journalism 
and the fiercest money-making, and 
faculties are being wakened in it that will 
some day answer the call to higher uses. 
The influences which will bear on it to 
that result are gathering volume and 
weight. For powerful forces are working 
even now in the world to broaden life 
for those who will have it so, not super- 
ficially, but profoundly, and not in mere 
sense and circumstance, but in conscious- 
ness and power. 

There are some ideas which, when 
they have got a setting in the mind, are 
like magnifying lenses to the eye of 
reason, clearing and enlarging its whole 
vision of things. The Copernican idea of 
the structure of the universe was such an 
one. By dispelling the human egotism of 
the view which put man and his habita- 
tion at the centre of creation, it opened 
new vistas to thinking in a hundred 
directions. The idea which Newton 



THE PRINTING PRESS 129 

brought to light, of a unity of law in 
the universe, was another. The completer 
development of that idea in the doctrine 
of the correlation of forces, or the present 
notion of energy, is another. But of all 
the emancipating conceptions which, one 
by one, have entered and possessed the 
mind of man, there was never one before 
that brought such liberations with it as 
came in Darwin's message to our own 
time. It is hardly too much to say that 
the full, free exercise of human reason 
on all the greater problems of life and 
destiny, whether personal or social, really 
began with the perception and apprehen- 
sion of evolutionary processes in God's 
work. That has raised the thinking 
minds of our day to a summit of obser- 
vation which was never attainable before, 
while eager science brings daily new helps 
to them for the expansion of their view. 
It is true that this intellectual expan- 
sion of life is known nowhere to all men. 
Even so much of it as goes with vague 



130 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 

glimpses of the working of universal law 
is still no common experience ; while 
those who know it in its fullness are every- 
where a few. But something from it is 
diffusing itself in the whole atmosphere 
of the age; something penetrating, 
stimulating, virile ; something which 
most men are compelled to feel whether 
they comprehend it or not, and to which 
the finer elements in them must respond 
by some sort of rally and growth. Of 
hopeful phenomena in the world, that one 
is the greatest of all. It indexes a new 
state of the common mind, now cleared 
for the most part of old superstitions, and 
thus prepared for the receiving of light 
to dispel its old ignorances. 

And what a wakening of moral no less 
than intellectual energies there is in our 
time, for work directed to that end ! A 
little while ago the steam engine, the 
factory, the forge, the mine, the mart, 
represented about all the human energy 
that made itself conspicuous in the civil- 



THE PRINTING PRESS 131 

ized world, excepting some occasional 
explosions of it in movements of religious 
and political enthusiasm and in raging 
outbursts of war. To-day it is not so. 
No little part of the interest, the ardor, 
the force, the ingenuity which spent 
themselves on those objects before are 
going over into a very different field. 
We are seeing the rise of an enterprise 
in education which almost rivals the en- 
terprise of mechanic industry and trade. 
Invention is half as busy in the improv- 
ing of schools, in the perfecting of in- 
struction, in the circulating of books, in 
the stimulating of reading and study, as 
it used to be busy in the making of 
machines. The diffusion of literature is 
left no longer to depend, like the diffusion 
of cotton fabrics or tea, on the mercenary 
agencies of trade. Half a century ago 
the free public library was created. For 
thirty years past it has been worked over 
by one set of people, just as the steam 
engine has been worked over by another 



132 GOOD AND EVIL FROM 

set, and the electric dynamo by a third. 
Its powers have been learned, its effi- 
ciency developed, in the same scientific 
way. Cunning variations of form are 
being wrought in it, to fit all circum- 
stances and to do its civilizing work in 
all places. It becomes a Traveling Li- 
brary to make its way into villages and 
rural corners of the land. It becomes 
a Home Library to reach the tenement- 
houses and purlieus of the city. It 
spreads itself in branches and delivery 
stations. It distributes choice reading 
in the schools, to broaden the teacher's 
work. It drums and advertises its un- 
priced wares like a shop-keeper, avari- 
cious of gain. It is taking up the eager, 
laborious, strenuous spirit of the present 
age, and wresting some large part of it 
away from the sordid activities of life, to 
give it unmercenary aims. 

So books are being made to do con- 
siderably alone what books and newspa- 
pers ought rightly to be doing together. 



THE PRINTING PRESS 133 

As a carrier in the spiritual commerce of 
the world, the book is not nearly so agile, 
so lightly winged, so Mercury-like as the 
newspaper can be ; but when each is at 
the best, how much nobler is the freight- 
age of books ! 

I rest my faith in a future of finer 
culture for mankind on the energy of 
free public libraries in distributing good 
books, far more than on any other agency 
that is working in the world. So far they 
have but opened gates into the field of 
influence that is before them ; but the 
gates are really swung wide, and the 
length and breadth of the field is fully 
seen, and the spirit that will possess it 
and work in it is eagerly alive. I speak 
soberly when I say that the greatest an- 
tagonism to be met and overcome is that 
of the vulgarized part of the newspaper 
press. I say this with persisting iteration, 
because I am convinced that it is the fact 
which needs most at the present day to 
be understood. How to win readers of 



134 THE PRINTING PRESS 

the general mass from unwholesome 
newspapers to wholesome books, or how 
to change the spirit of the common news- 
papers of the day from flippancy to so- 
briety, — from the tone of the worst in 
social manners and morals to the tone of 
the best, — is one of the gravest pending 
problems of civilization, if not the gravest 
of all. The zeal and energy of free schools 
and free libraries can achieve the solu- 
tion of it, and I see nothing else that can. 



VI 

PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 



PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 
PUBLIC EDUCATION 1 

The function of our free circulating libra- 
ries is diffusion, which is a function of 
active responsibility. The prime purpose 
of their institution is to bring to bear 
upon the greatest possible number of 
people the profitable influences that are 
found in books. That object restricts 
them to no narrow range. It takes in 
whatever can be tributary to all that has 
excellence and value in men. It embraces 
the wholesome literature of imagination 
and emotion, no less than the literature of 
knowledge and thought. The graces and 
harmonies of education, and the sweet- 
enings and colorings of life, are compre- 

1 From a paper read before the American Social 
Science Association, in 1883. 



138 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 

hended equally with the ethics and the 
practical powers. There is no narrow- 
ness in the range, as I have said ; but it 
has a well-marked bound. It is bounded 
by all the lines in literature which sepa- 
rate purity from grossness, art from rub- 
bish, good from bad. It is so bounded by 
its purpose, which I think I have stated 
with precision when I say that the sole 
reason for the existence of a popular 
library is the endeavor made through it 
to bring to bear on the greatest possible 
number of people the profitable influ- 
ences that are in books ; and it has no 
excuse for being if it cannot discriminate 
with some success between the profitable 
and the unprofitable quality of books. 

Of course this involves a selective crit- 
icism, or a censorship of books, if one 
chooses to call it so, in the government 
of popular libraries ; but what then ? Is 
not the same kind of selective criticism, 
— the same kind of discriminative judg- 
ment, — the same censorial assumption, 



PUBLIC EDUCATION 139 

— involved in all public services, from 
legislation down ? To what public insti- 
tution will it be denied ? If a gallery of 
art is founded, for the finer teaching of 
the eyes of the people, and for kindling 
the light of the love of beauty in their 
souls, does any one claim a place in it 
for the pictorial advertisements of the cir- 
cus, or for the popular sculpture of the 
cemeteries, on the ground that there is 
a public which finds pleasure in them ? 
Yet something comparable with that de- 
mand is found in the frequent expecta- 
tion that public libraries shall descend to 
levels of taste in literature which all cul- 
tivated taste condemns. It is assumed 
quite naturally that somewhere in the 
control of a public art-collection there 
shall be an instructed criticism at work, 
to distinguish, with what care and capa- 
bility it can, the true productions of art 
from its counterfeits, and to set up cer- 
tain standards of taste which it is desir- 
able to have urged upon the public for 



140 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 

common recognition. Wherein are the 
considerations which bear on the popu- 
larizing of literature and the teaching of 
books, by means of public libraries, dif- 
ferent from those that bear on the popu- 
larizing of art by public museums of 
painting, sculpture, and design ? If they 
differ at all it is by reason of the greater 
power and greater importance of the 
educating influence in books. 

I am not thinking altogether of ques- 
tions touching fiction in public libraries, 
which have been much discussed ; though 
that, in the treatment of this subject, 
takes, of course, the foremost place. It 
is a question much discussed, but not 
always on broad grounds. Here is a form 
of literature that we have seen, almost in 
our own generation, rise from a modest 
rank in the realm of letters to undisputed 
ascendency. It has introduced a new 
Muse to our Olympus and has throned 
her royally in the highest seat, where the 
crown and the sceptre, the honors and 



PUBLIC EDUCATION 141 

the powers of the pen, are alike given up 
to her. For my part, I am submissive to 
the revolution that has brought us under 
this new reign in literature ; I have no 
discontent with it. I recognize the mod- 
ern Romance, or Novel, as the true heir 
and natural successor of the Epic and 
the Drama, which held anciently, in their 
turn, the regal place in literature. I look 
upon it as representing no mere literary 
fashion of the day, but distinctly a de- 
velopment in literary art — the plastic 
shaping by organic growth of a new, 
perfected form of epic and dramatic ex- 
pression moulded in one ; fitting itself to 
new conditions of general culture, with 
more versatile capabilities and powers. 
It is not alone approved by the suffrages 
of the multitude, it is preferred by the 
bards and " makers " themselves. More 
and more we can see that the dramatic 
genius of the age turns lovingly to this 
new form of art and expends itself upon 
it. If Shakspere were living in these 



142 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 

days, I doubt not we should have more 
novels than plays from his pen. 

At all events the chief power in litera- 
ture for our generation belongs to the 
novel, and if we will recognize and deal 
with it broadly in that view there is 
nothing lamentable in the fact. Let us 
freely concede to it the great domain it 
has won for itself on the art-side of litera- 
ture, and pay to it the respect we give 
to all art — no less, no more. We can 
hardly claim to have done that yet. 
There is something half disdainful, half 
shamed and apologetic, in the very hom- 
age conceded to this new-comer among 
the Muses. Her devotees do not seem to 
be quite assured of her Olympian repu- 
tability, and find, perhaps, a little pleas- 
ure in the suspicion that she and Folly are 
near kin. So we all continue to speak of 
the realm of " light literature ; " as though 
the literature that is weighted with the 
fruits of the genius of George Eliot, 
Thackeray, Dickens, Balzac, Hawthorne, 



PUBLIC EDUCATION 143 

Scott, De Foe, can justly be called " light." 
The lightness which it has is the lightness 
of the spirit of art — the lightness which 
art takes from the up-bearing wings on 
which it is exalted, and whereby it has 
the power to transport us high and far, 
and make us travelers beyond the swim- 
ming of ships or the rolling of wheels. 

Whatever it may be that acts on men 
with that kind of power is a factor in 
education as important as science or his- 
tory. It is like the wine and sweetness 
of the fruits which are the wholesome 
peptic trifles of our bodily food, and 
it contributes quite as much as the 
strong meats of learning to a vigorous 
and symmetrical growth of human char- 
acter. In the novel, these potencies of 
art are universalized more than in any 
preceding form ; it brings a larger mass 
of mankind within their range, to be 
quickened in spirit by them and to be 
wrought upon by an inward leaven which 
human beings are sodden without. As 



144 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 

a true product of art in literature, the novel 
seems to me to be a great instrument of 
education, in the large sense of the word 
— not for all men and women, perhaps, 
but for most, and especially for those 
whose lives are narrow and constrained. 
There are not many of us who do not 
owe to it some reaches and happy vistas 
of the intellectual landscape in which we 
live, and the compass of our thoughts, 
feelings, sympathies, tolerances, would 
shrink sadly if they were taken away. 
It is only a little region of actual things 
that we can include in our personal hori- 
zons — a few individual people, a few 
communities, a few groups and growths 
of society, a few places, a few situations 
and arrangements of circumstance, a few 
movements of events, that we can know 
and be familiar with by any intimacy and 
experience of our own. But how easily 
our neighborhoods and acquaintances 
are multiplied for us by the hospitable 
genius of the novelist ! To be put in 



PUBLIC EDUCATION 145 

companionship with Caleb Garth and 
Adam Bede, with Colonel Newcome and 
Henry Esmond ; to meet Mrs. Poyser 
and Mr. Weller ; to visit in Barsetshire 
with Mr. Trollope and loiter through 
Alsace with the Messrs. Erckmann and 
Chatrian ; to look on Saxon England 
with the imagination of Kingsley, on 
Eighteenth-century England with the 
sympathetic understanding of Thack- 
eray, on Puritan Massachusetts with the 
clairvoyance of Hawthorne — how large 
and many-sided a life must be to em- 
brace in its actualities so much of a ripen- 
ing education as this ! 

But, if there is no other form in which 
the broadening influences of art can be 
exercised more powerfully than in the 
novel, there is no other form that lends 
itself to base counterfeiting so easily. 
And the vulgar product is vulgar beyond 
comparison with any other. More than 
vulgar; for the travesty of life which 
these romances of book-smithing exhibit 



146 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 

is mischievous in its whole effect. Every 
feeling that they act upon, every senti- 
ment that they stimulate, every idea that 
they produce, is infected with the falsity 
that is in them. Neither virtue nor piety 
in the intention with which they are com- 
posed can better very much the evil 
influence they exert ; for clean as they 
may be of all other vice, there is wick- 
edness in their misrepresentations and 
depravity in their untruth. I see nothing 
for my own part but malarial unwhole- 
someness, breeding moral distempers and 
intellectual debility, in the trash of fiction 
with which the world is being flooded, 
whether it emanates from the " Satanic " 
or the Sunday-School press. 

No agency is available for resisting this 
flood so effectively and so responsibly 
as the public library. I do not know that 
its right to exercise upon literature the 
criticism which discriminates art from 
rubbish is ever disclaimed formally, but 
it seems often to stand in some doubt. 



PUBLIC EDUCATION 147 

Perhaps the criticism demanded in this 
case is not distinguished clearly from the 
presuming and very different censorship 
that would inspect opinions, and under- 
take to judge for the public between true 
and false teaching in religion, or politics, 
or social economy ; but the two have no 
principle in common. They differ as the 
insolence of sumptuary laws differs from 
the sound reasonableness of laws for the 
suppression of counterfeits and adultera- 
tions. If there could be an institution for 
the purveying of food, or drugs, or any 
kind of material provision, that should 
stand in a relation to the public like that 
of the free library, we would certainly 
deny its right to a jurisdiction over the 
demands of the people so far as concerned 
the kinds and varieties of commodities 
to be supplied ; but just as certainly we 
would hold it responsible for the quality 
of the things it had been instituted to 
provide. We would reasonably require 
the institution to be so organized as to 



148 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 

embrace within its management the 
capability to distinguish competent from 
incompetent work, and genuine from 
counterfeited products. That is precisely 
the kind of discrimination to be exercised 
in public libraries in the matter of this 
romance literature, which is worth so 
much as a product of literary art and is 
so worthless when wanting the touches 
of art. The question concerning it is al- 
most purely a question of quality. Where 
a subtler question arises, — a debatable 
question of taste, within the range of 
uncertain canons in which questions of 
taste are open, — I would not ask to 
have it arbitrated in a public library. But 
the great mass of the trash of fiction is 
not touched by such questions. The dis- 
cernment of its worthlessness depends on 
nothing but some familiar acquaintance 
with good literature, and on the sense 
of quality which that acquaintance will 
develop. 

If public libraries do no more than 



PUBLIC EDUCATION 149 

administer those common verdicts of the 
literary world that are of authority and 
weight, they will sweep a mountain of 
rubbish from their shelves ; they will 
command from the public a hearing for 
criticism that will never be secured other- 
wise, and they will be exercising in a 
most important particular the educational 
responsibility that belongs to them. The 
safe rule under which I should like to 
see them placed in their dealing with 
romance is the rule of conservatism — of 
slowness — of waiting for the judgments 
and verdicts by which literary work is 
proved. They are not speculators in the 
book market ; their interest in literature 
is not a commercial one, like Mudie's ; 
they are instituted for a missionary pur- 
pose, and their business, as I have said, 
is to bring to bear on the greatest 
number of people the profitable influences 
that are in books. Why should they be 
in haste to catch up the novelties of the 
romance press, like merchants eager for 



150 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 

custom ? Why should they not keep all 
this doubtful literature waiting at their 
doors till it has been weighed and pro- 
nounced upon, not by the public opinion 
of Tom, Dick and Harry, and the school- 
girls, and the idle and raw-minded body 
of readers, but by the instructed public 
opinion which is the court of last resort 
for all books, and which determines the 
ultimate fate of all ? 

I have not touched the question of 
morals as affecting this literature, because 
that is included substantially in the ques- 
tion of literary quality. In America and 
England (I say nothing of other coun- 
tries) the literary taste which prevails and 
has authority is moral enough, because 
healthy enough, to be trusted fairly with 
the whole adjudication. I know of no 
vicious or unwholesome novel, poem, 
play, or other imaginative work belong- 
ing to contemporary literature, that has 
standing enough in the English-speaking 
literary world to commend it to a public 



PUBLIC EDUCATION 151 

library, if nothing is considered but the 
view of it from literary standpoints. 
Generally, I think, among the Teutonic 
peoples, the conception of art is essen- 
tially a moral conception, — the concep- 
tion of a fundamental purity, — and the 
more highly the art-sense of these peoples 
is cultivated the more clear-sighted it be- 
comes as to the falsity in art of all moral 
falsity. And so I should feel safe in 
making it the rule for public libraries of 
the popular class, that they should admit 
freely whatever wins a good standing in 
the literary public opinion of the time, 
and admit nothing till that standing is 
assured to it. 

There is a large body of older litera- 
ture which requires some different rule. 
It comes to us from coarse or corrupted 
periods of the past, when the ethics of 
literary art were slightly perceived, little 
felt. In some of it there are all the ad- 
mirable qualities that imaginative litera- 
ture produced without moral sensitive- 



152 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 

ness can have. It is vigorous, brilliant, 
graceful. It gained in its own day a lit- 
erary standing which it could not win in 
ours ; but we are disposed, and perhaps 
rightly, to let it stand at the original 
rating. Historically, as representative 
literature, it has great importance and 
interest to those who will use it in that 
character, as students of literature and 
history in the thorough-going sense. But 
I can see no good purpose it can serve 
in popular libraries, and no reason for its 
having a place in them. The drama of 
the Restoration, a great part of the more 
famous novels of the eighteenth century, 
with much of the older romance, are 
examples of what I mean. On what 
reasonable ground is acquaintance with 
them popularized at the present day ? Of 
the kindred literature from other lan- 
guages that has been imported into the 
English by translation, I can only ask the 
same question with more emphasis. 
I leave large ranges of literature, in 



PUBLIC EDUCATION 153 

which nothing I have said will offer a 
hint of the bounds I am asking to have 
set for our popular libraries ; and I am 
ready to confess with frankness that I do 
not know where to set the bounds, nor 
how. Perhaps it is not a practicable 
thing to do. And yet I am sure the at- 
tempt should be made to mark out, in all 
literature, with some rough consistency, 
the provinces of the popular library, 
as distinguished from the library of re- 
search and history, or the museum of 
books. Not, I say again, to set narrow 
or parsimonious limitations upon them. 
It is no petty conception of the popular 
library that I have formed. For popu- 
lar uses I want it as great as it can be 
made. Not for uses of common reading 
only, but for all uses. I should have 
looked but a little way into the influence 
of these libraries if I took account of no 
more than the set " reading" that they 
encourage and supply. They have a 
greater office than that. It is to induce 



154 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 

a habit among people of following up 
the chance topics and questions in which 
their interest happens from time to time 
to be stirred by casual circumstances and 
hints. A school exercise, a newspaper 
paragraph, an allusion from the pulpit,, 
a picture, a quotation, a play, will often 
supply an impulse that carries itself long 
and far into the intellectual life and 
growth of our library students, but which, 
without the help of the public library, 
would come to naught. Making it com- 
mon and habitual, in some wide circle 
of people, to say on such occasions, " I 
will go to the library and pursue this mat- 
ter," or " put this statement to the proof,' ' 
or " learn more of this man " or "of 
these writings,' ' the public library brings 
into action more energies of education 
than can be organized in any college or 
school. And so, for its greatest efficiency, 
it needs to be equipped largely, liberally, 
with resources for every kind of common 
investigation ; for every kind of investi- 



PUBLIC EDUCATION 155 

gation, I mean, that is not elaborated in 
professional study, or special scientific 
research, or minute erudition. For such 
special quests and profounder pursuits of 
learning I do not think that the popular 
library should undertake the providing 
of books. All the resources it can com- 
mand will seldom be too great for em- 
ployment in its own great office, which 
is to popularize the profitable influence 
of books. 

Before everything else it should have 
these two aims : First, to be abounding 
in its supply of good literature, within 
the range of popular use ; second, to be 
perfect in arrangements for exhibiting its 
stores and making them accessible, and 
to be fertile and persistent in devices for 
winning students and for helping them 
with all encouraging aids. If the library 
is stinted anywhere, let it not be in the 
better books for which there is most of 
a popular call. Better fifty copies of one 
book that will get so many readers, than 



156 PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND 

fifty various books which few will use. I 
am disposed to believe that a popular 
library should expend its means very 
grudgingly upon wider acquisitions until 
it has so multiplied on its shelves the few 
best books most wanted by its general 
readers that it will seldom disappoint a 
call for one of them. I put that forward 
as the first claim upon its funds ; and next 
to that I put the employment of adequate 
methods for exhibiting and advertising 
its books and their contents and charac- 
ter to the public. Classification, annota- 
tion, analysis, in catalogues and bulle- 
tins, with indexes, reference-lists, helpful 
hand-books, and bibliographical guides, 
— these are objects of expenditure more 
important than the gathering of numer- 
ous books. A small, well-chosen library, 
in systematic order, opening every ave- 
nue to its contents that can be cleared 
and lighted up by judicious labor, — in- 
spiring, leading, and helping its studious 
readers by all the methods which the 



PUBLIC EDUCATION 157 

earnest library workers of this country 
are learning to employ, — is an agent of 
education more powerful than the great- 
est collection can ever become, if the 
ambition in the latter to have books out- 
runs the ambition to spread the influ- 
ence of its books. Both of these ambitions 
are working, more or less, in the popular 
libraries of this country ; but the spirit of 
the time and the race is on the side of 
the wiser purpose, and it is wonderful to 
see with what contagion of zeal the dif- 
fusive work of our public libraries has 
been animated in late years. It is be- 
cause I honor so highly the conscience 
that has been awakened in the work of 
these libraries, and the power they are 
acquiring among the institutions of de- 
mocracy, that I wish to see no waste in 
their energies. 



VII 
SCHOOL-READING 

VERSUS 

SCHOOL-TEACHING OF 
HISTORY 



SCHOOL-READING 

VERSUS 

SCHOOL-TEACHING OF 
HISTORY 1 

If I did not know the fact to be other- 
wise, I should suppose that a desire for 
some satisfying knowledge of the past 
life of mankind, and especially within the 
range of direct ancestries and inherit- 
ances, would be one of the keenest crav- 
ings of every active mind. That it is 
not so is too obvious to need proof ; and 
I think that, on reflection, we can under- 
stand the fact. That which lies near to 
us and in sunlight will naturally, always, 
engage our attention more easily and 
hold it more strongly than that which 

1 Read at a meeting of the Buffalo Historical 
Society, to which teachers of history were invited, 
May, 1906. 



162 SCHOOL-READING 

is shadowed and remote. The bit of re- 
cently past time which we call the Present 
is our sunlighted portion of time, and 
its subjects and objects of interest are 
pressed most insistently upon us. To 
a great extent we are compelled to give 
them the first place in our thoughts; 
because our means of subsistence, and 
therefore our lives, are dependent on 
things and conditions, not as they have 
been, but as they are. Our social rela- 
tions, moreover, our ambitions, our activ- 
ities of all kinds, are under the same 
control. Those things and conditions, to 
be sure, have their roots in the past and 
their growth out of it ; but the fruits that 
are ripening from them now are what we 
have to gather, for the daily provisioning 
of daily life, and they busy us so that we 
can easily lose thought of the historic 
soils and saps from which they came. 

It is thus, by a thousand imperative 
needs and interests, that the Present, or 
what we call so, wins a natural domina- 



OF HISTORY 163 

tion, and may even take the nearly full 
possession, of our minds. I can under- 
stand, therefore, how and why the ma- 
jority of people feel no apparent want of 
any knowledge beyond that which the 
morning newspaper supplies, of men and 
things in the world of the passing day : 
the practical knowledge that suffices for 
traffic, speculation, partisan politics, so- 
cial conversation, and other immediate 
interests in life. I can understand, too, 
how and why it is that so many, among 
the people whose appetite of the brain 
calls for meats which the reporters of the 
daily press cannot serve to them, prefer 
other kinds of knowledge before that of 
human history, caring more to know how 
the earth got its structure, or how beasts, 
birds, and insects acquired their varia- 
tions, or how plants are best classified, 
or how the forces in nature are related 
to each other, than to know something 
of the experience that the generations 
of mankind have gone through, in their 



i6 4 SCHOOL-READING 

long procession down the ages of the 
dead ; something of the influences that 
have played upon them, — the changes 
in outward circumstance and inward 
state that they have undergone, — the 
successions of their tasks, their achieve- 
ments, their struggles, — out of which 
have come Humanity as we know it, 
Life as we live it, Society as we make 
part of it, the Earth as we, the latest heirs 
to that human-family estate, find it fitted 
and furnished for our habitation. I can 
see all such preference of Science before 
History to be natural, because it is con- 
sequent on the overpowering pressure 
with which present objects and present in- 
terests are forced upon the attention of our 
minds. Science in general is a study for 
the most part of things as the student 
sees them with his own eyes, — the phe- 
nomena of his own day, — and it tends, 
as commerce and society and newspa- 
pers do, to cultivate habits of mental 
seclusion within some limited region of 



OF HISTORY 165 

passing time. There is no fault to be 
found with the preference of that study, 
choosing the good knowledge of Science 
before the good knowledge of History ; 
nor need we blame the more prac- 
tical choice which rates a necessary 
knowledge of the existing conditions of 
life above the interesting knowledge of 
how those conditions came to be what 
they are. There is no fault, I say, to 
be found with such preferences, except 
where they put History quite out of 
consideration, as they often seem to do. 
That goes beyond my understanding; 
for it is no natural consequence of any- 
thing that the obtrusive and exacting 
Present imposes upon us. 

In saying that the prevalent disposition 
to put History behind other more obtru- 
sive matters of knowledge is natural and 
explainable, I do not mean to imply that 
it is reasonable, or that Science is of 
more importance than History, or that 
the Present holds more of the valuables 



166 SCHOOL-READING 

of life than are stored for us in the re- 
membered Past. There are no such com- 
parisons to be made. Present and Past, 
from the same spinning of time, into the 
same never-broken thread, woven into 
the same continuous fabric of human life, 
have no divisible value to us. Neither 
can be to us nor signify to us anything 
independently of the other. The Past 
has its explanations in the Present, the 
Present in the Past. Whatever real sub- 
stance of knowledge we get into our 
minds, and whatever real substance of 
satisfaction we get into our lives, must 
come from both. 

Mr. Rhodes, the historian, in an excel- 
lent address which he made on taking the 
chair of the presidency of the American 
Historical Association, in 1899, conceded 
too much, I think, on this point. " The 
Present," he said, "is more important 
than the Past, and those sciences which 
contribute to our comfort, place within 
reach of the laborer and mechanic as 



OF HISTORY 167 

common necessaries what would have 
been the highest luxury to the Roman 
emperor or to the king of the Middle 
Ages, contribute to health and the pre- 
servation of life, and, by the develop- 
ment of railroads, make possible such 
a gathering as this, — these agencies, we 
cheerfully admit, outrank our modest 
enterprise, which, in the words of Herod- 
otus, is 'to preserve the remembrance of 
what men have done.' " I cannot agree 
with this view. I would say, on the con- 
trary, that History has an underlying and 
upholding relation to every science and 
every industry, and cannot, therefore, be 
outranked by any. We could not even 
choose our foods for to-day's dinner if 
we had nothing from the Past of mankind 
to instruct us concerning the gifts of 
nature that are eatable and those that 
are not. That is History, on its simplest 
side. No man of to-day could even form 
the conception of a railroad locomotive, 
and far less construct one, if History had 



168 SCHOOL-READING 

not brought to him the ideas of Watt 
and Stephenson from a century ago. It 
is so with everything in the passing day 
that we do or wish to do, that we obtain 
or wish to obtain, that we know or wish 
to know : there is something of History 
behind it all which we must understand 
if the doing or obtaining or knowing is 
to be a possible thing. 

And it is not alone in those outward 
ways that the Past comes historically into 
every present moment. It has more 
entrance than we are apt to suspect into 
all the chambers and all the processes 
of our minds. We do no thinking, we 
exercise no imagination, we have no 
emotion, without it. For what is memory 
but the private historical collection which 
each man makes for himself ? It may be 
limited very closely to the annals of his 
own life, — to the little region of his own 
doings and experiences ; but even at the 
narrowest, there will always be some- 
thing from a larger history that has 



OF HISTORY 169 

crept into it, and which has some kind 
of vague participation in his feelings and 
thoughts. Names, at least, that carry 
some historical meaning, will have got 
a lodgment in his brain. Washington, 
Shakspere, Columbus, Caesar, Mara- 
thon, Magna Charta, the Declaration of 
Independence, the French Revolution, 
and other men, movements, and docu- 
ments of the Past, will figure, in some 
dim way, in his beliefs, and in the general 
notions that run through all the workings 
of his mind. Try to conceive, if you can, 
the state of a human consciousness in 
which absolutely nothing of such histor- 
ical idea-stuff is contained ; then, perhaps, 
you can realize how much the more or 
less of it has to do with the measure and 
quality of our lives. The historical 
memory, in fact, is like an atmosphere in 
our mental world, making it spatial, put- 
ting distance, perspective, scenery into 
it, by refractions and diffusions of our con- 
sciousness, which otherwise would be like 



170 SCHOOL-READING 

the flash on flash of straight sun-rays to 
an eye looking out from the airless moon, 
which could never see aught but the sun 
itself. Without its importation of some- 
thing from the long Past into the sensa- 
tions of the momentary present, our lives 
would be like the journey of a traveler 
through dark tunnels underground. 

To think of this is to recognize the 
absolute emptiness of those current in- 
stants of time which we call the Present, 
except as we bring furniture to them by 
importation from the Past, in private 
stores that are Memory or in public stores 
that are History. We not only borrow 
from the days that are gone every power 
that enables us to extort the practical 
necessities of life from this present day, 
but we go to them for everything that 
lends interest to the passing days of our 
lives. This is the great fact which puts 
historical knowledge, in my esteem, 
above all other matters of knowledge 
that man can seek. By enrichment 



OF HISTORY 171 

of his consciousness it enriches every- 
thing that is interesting in his life. The 
realm of his mind is narrow or large in 
its resources of interest, according to the 
radius of its historical horizon and its 
scenic vision of general human life. His- 
torical knowledge is needed, therefore, 
for all minds, as the indispensable furni- 1/ 
ture of a satisfying mental life. The man 
of science and the man of business can 
give room to it, not only with no detriment 
to the specialized occupations of their 
thought, but with gains of animation and 
enlargement that could come, I am sure, 
from nothing else. It is the one kind of 
knowledge which, more than any other, 
is expansive in its whole effect ; which 
resists the monotonizing of interests 
and the narrowing of views. " Histo- 
ries," says Bacon, in his pregnant essay 
on "Studies," — "histories make men 
wise," and he gave them the first place 
in all that he commends. 

These, to me, are the all-sufficient 



1 72 SCHOOL-READING 

reasons for an early and long and large 
use of History in educational work. The 
more specific pleas for it, urged com- 
monly : that it exercises the judgment 
and the imagination, — that it is full of 
ethical lessons and instructive examples 
of character, — that it will cultivate pa- 
triotism, and the like, — are not so strong. 
They are all true ; there is sound argu- 
ment in them all ; but they are all tran- 
scended by the fact that, in the nature 
of the human mind, its very capacity for 
any knowledge, and its pleasure in any, 
are dependent on the spatial and per- 
spective conditions imparted to it by its 
own historian, the Memory. More or less 
of History it must carry among its con- 
tents, in order to be at all an intelligent 
mind. For its richest and best endow- 
ment of power to do and to enjoy, in 
any field of human endeavor, it cannot 
be freighted with too much. 

What, then, can be more important 
in education than the use of means and 



OF HISTORY 173 

efforts to overcome those strenuous pres- 
sures and influences which tend naturally 
to hold the attention of people too closely 
to things of the passing day, blinding 
them to the wonderful landscapes of the 
historic Past, and depriving them of its 
immeasurable enrichment of the life of 
the mind? Until recent years History 
had no well-recognized place in common 
or general schemes of education. Now 
it is winning a fairly acknowledged foot- 
ing in our elementary and secondary 
schools, but only by hard contention and 
competition with studies that offer, as it 
seems to me, no comparable gifts of cul- 
ture or power. The claims for it are still 
too low. Its place should not be in the 
ruck of an overcrowded curriculum, but 
clear in the van of preferred subjects, 
through all grades from the middle, at 
least, of every elementary course. I ven- 
ture to predict that the consideration it 
is beginning to receive will soon give it 
an unquestioned title to that place. Fur- 



u- 



174 SCHOOL-READING 

thermore, I shall venture to submit 
some speculations of thought that I have 
indulged myself in, concerning a school 
treatment of History which might pos- 
sibly be more effectual than the modes 
of treatment now pursued. I am not a 
teacher ; I have done no teaching at any 
time of my life ; and I should be guilty 
of great presumption if I spoke with dog- 
matism on the subject ; but I think there 
can be no impropriety in a plain state- 
ment of my thought to those who can 
give it consideration from the teacher's 
point of view. 

I assume that the general purpose and 
aim of the work done in our school-rooms 
is not to stock the minds of the young 
with a provision of knowledge, in any 
department, that will suffice them for 
their lives ; but rather to introduce them 
to knowledge, — prepare them to be re- 
ceptive of it, — acquaint them with its 
attractions and its uses, — put them in 
the way of pursuing the acquisition of it 



OF HISTORY 175 

through later life, and familiarize them 
with the paths of that pursuit. This must 
be so in the matter of History, if in 
nothing else. No intelligent teachers of 
History will think that they have given 
as much of it to their classes as can be 
for the pupils' good. On the other hand, 
no teachers will work with an eye to the 
turning out of whole classes of profes- 
sional historians, trained for exhaustive 
research, and destined to devote their 
lives to the study and original construc- 
tion of history from its sources in public 
and private depositories of important 
fact. For one in a thousand, perhaps, the 
instruction fitted to that end might be 
given profitably ; but it would not be of 
profit to the remaining nine hundred and 
ninety-nine. The service of the school to 
them in this matter must simply be such 
as to make them lovers of the literature 
of History, — lovers, that is, of History 
as a finished product of trained research 
and judgment and literary art. In a word, 



176 SCHOOL-READING 

I would say that the office of the school 
in its educational use of History is to 
evoke the appetite for historical reading, 
and to prepare judgment and taste for 
a right choice of writers and books. 

Is this office performed in the best 
possible way by any method of teaching 
History now employed in our schools ? 
I have been led to serious doubts on that 
point ; and my doubts have gone so far 
as to question whether the results I have 
indicated can be attained satisfactorily 
by any treatment of History that would 
be describable as " teaching," in the cus- 
tomary use of the word. I have read 
many excellent papers on such methods, 
written by wise and earnest teachers, of 
great experience ; and the fine thought 
and spirit in most of them have impressed 
me very much ; but at the base of them 
all, I find more or less of a catechising 
requirement which cannot, as I would 
judge, be favorable to the reading-inter- 
est and habit that we wish to create. It 



OF HISTORY 177 

involves a piece-meal treatment of the 
details in an historical narrative, which 
breaks the continuity of impression from 
them on the pupil's mind. But most 
of that allured and prolonged attention 
which we call "interest" depends on 
this very continuity of impressions which 
such treatment breaks up. For History 
is, essentially, a story, and my feeling is 
that it must not be spoiled as a story by 
anything done to it in the schools. What- 
ever it carries, of political, moral, and 
other meanings and teachings, is carried 
in the current of its story, not, I am sure, 
to be fished out with question-hooks, but 
to be borne fluently into the mind, with 
the stream, which will create for it a wel- 
coming thirst. 

What I wish to argue for, therefore, is 
the simple reading of History in schools, 
with no analytical teaching, questioning, 
or periodical examination, to break the 
thread of the tale which the school or 
the class pursues. Of course it should be 



178 SCHOOL-READING 

systematic reading, under the lead of a 
capable teacher, whose accompanying 
comments may emphasize, explain, illu- 
minate, and illustrate, here and there, 
^ according to need ; but, as nearly as 
possible, it ought, I think, to preserve 
the effect which a mind experiences in 
taking information to itself, by its own 
volition and its own absorption, from a 
printed page. Leave the matter of the 
reading to have what fate it will in various 
minds ! Trust all immediate results to 
the ultimate result! What if the daily 
leakage from young minds is large, 
provided we are opening inlets to them 
from springs in later years that will never 
run dry ! Let us remember the stream- 
likeness of this story of the Past, and 
allow it to trickle its course through such 
irrigating brain-channels as it finds, with 
no incessant casting of lead-lines to test 
its depth ! It is not in this matter as it is 
with the little cisterns of Arithmetic and 
Grammar and Geography that we try to 



OF HISTORY 179 

fill, once for all, in the brain. There the 
quizzing plummet and the examination 
dredge have their proper use. Here we 
are introducing something very different, 
for a very different action and agency ; 
something to be for a general diffusion, 
expansion, refreshment, and stimulation 
of all consciousness, all feeling, all im- 
agination, all thought. Then why not 
give it free play, meddling as little as 
possible with its natural flow and with 
the natural deposits it will leave ? 

In my thought of this treatment of 
History, in elementary and secondary 
schools, the scheme of it would be some- 
thing like this : 

1. An underlying use of such readable 
text-books of abbreviated History as can 
be found ; such text-books as are not 
mere packages of assorted fact, but which 
give a fluent showing of the main move- 
ments of events, with a moderate amount 
of detail. These to be carriers, as it were, 
of the historical narrative through its 



180 SCHOOL-READING 

less important parts, where they suffice 
to keep interest alive or to make the 
connection with coming incidents under- 
stood. 

2. The bringing in of passages and 
chapters from the classic and standard 
works of historical literature at all points 
in the narrative where a broader and 
more vivid treatment can be introduced 
with marked effect. 

3. A judicious accompaniment of com- 
ment and explanation by the directing 
teacher, restrained carefully to avoid 
much diversion of mind from the reading 
itself. 

For example, if I planned an experiment 
in this treatment of History with a class of 
young people, I would take such a book 
as might easily be made out of Freeman's 
" General Sketch of European History" 
and use it for the threading of careful 
selections from the best historical litera- 
ture within its field. It is a book that 
needs revision of its first two chapters, 



OF HISTORY 181 

to bring into it later views and revelations 
in ethnology and Greek archaeology ; 
otherwise it seems to me to be excellent 
in its adaptation to such a use. It could 
introduce bits of reading, in the first in- 
stance, from the Iliad and from some of 
the Greek hero-myths, in connection with 
extracts from popular accounts of the 
explorations at Troy, Mycenae, and in 
Crete, which throw light on their sources 
in historical fact. For a first reading in 
Greek history, Freeman's sketch gives 
enough of the origin and general course 
of the Persian wars ; but the stories of 
Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis 
should be read in Herodotus, or in 
Plutarch's Miltiades or Themistocles, 
or in both. Then I would carry the read- 
ing to those short sections of the first 
book of Thucydides (89 to 99) in which 
he tells in his plain way " how the Athe- 
nians attained the positions in which they 
rose to greatness " after the destruction 
of their city in the last of the Persian 



182 SCHOOL-READING 

wars ; how they formed the Confederacy 
of Delos and took the leadership of it ; 
how they abused their domination, made 
subjects of their allies, and so aroused 
the hostilities and jealousies that brought 
ruin upon them in the ensuing Pelopon- 
nesian War. To this I would add the 
later part of Plutarch's life of Aristides, 
which tells of the strengthening of de- 
mocracy at Athens at the end of the Per- 
sian wars and gives further particulars 
of the formation of the Delian Confeder- 
acy ; and I would draw yet more from 
Plutarch by liberal extracts from his lives 
of Themistocles and Pericles. To deepen 
and widen the impression from this, the 
great period in Greek history, I know of 
nothing better to be brought to a young 
class than may be found in chapters XVI 
and XVII of Evelyn Abbott's book -on 
" Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens." 
I am not sure that Freeman's slight 
sketch of the Peloponnesian War would 
need any enlargement; but something 



OF HISTORY 183 

from Thucydides and Xenophon, and 
from Plutarch's Alcibiades and Lysander, 
might supplement it interestingly and 
with profit. As for the period between 
the Peloponnesian War and the intrusion 
of Philip of Macedon into Greek affairs, 
there seems to be little call for going 
beyond Freeman's brief account. 

On coming to the Macedonian epoch 
it would undoubtedly be desirable to in- 
terest our young readers somewhat more, 
not only in the extraordinary conquests of 
Alexander, but in the preparatory work 
of Philip, his father, who was the abler 
and greater man of the two. My sug- 
gestion would be to take something in 
the first instance, for that purpose, from 
Plutarch's Demosthenes, and a few pages 
from the 66th and 67th of Niebuhr's 
" Lectures on Ancient History," where 
both Philip and his great Athenian op- 
ponent are estimated with much fairness 
of view. Concerning the immeasurable 
importance of Alexander's heroic career, 



184 SCHOOL-READING 

in its effects upon subsequent history, 
there is no room for two opinions ; but 
historians have differed so widely in their 
estimates of the hero that young readers 
should be acquainted, I think, with the 
opposing views. Thirlwall admires him 
and credits him largely with the great 
results that came from what he did. 
Grote does not. Perhaps there could be 
selections from each. After the death of 
Alexander, I judge that Freeman has told 
all that can be made interesting or in- 
structive to the average school-boy or 
school-girl, down to the time when Greek 
history is merged in that of Rome. 

Turning, then, to the latter, I would 
plan a similar course, in which Freeman 
should furnish the links of connection 
between readings from Livy, Plutarch, 
Polybius, Caesar, Tacitus, Mommsen, 
Merivale, Gibbon, and many more. 

If half an hour daily could be given 
to such readings, during seven or eight 
years of the period spent by a pupil 



OF HISTORY 185 

in graded school and high school, they 
would not only carry him, I judge, over 
very wide ranges of general history, and 
into familiarizing and appetizing touch 
with its best literature, but ample time 
would remain, I am sure, for repetitions 
and enlargements of the more important 
parts of the tour. Possibly in such repe- 
titions, traversing English and American 
history for the second time, more leisurely 
and with more nearly ripened minds, 
there might be something of the step-by- 
step " teaching " introduced with advan- 
tage. It might then be possible to scru- 
tinize, analyze, correlate, and otherwise 
discuss events and incidents one by one, 
without destroying interest in the his- 
torical movement to which they belong ; 
but I cannot believe that a first reading 
of history should be broken in any such 
way. I cannot believe that a tape-meas- 
urement of " lessons " in it, with a halt 
for quizzing at each mark on the tape, is 
as educational in this matter as a free 



186 SCHOOL-READING 

excursion would be. I cannot believe that 
History will waken the feeling that it 
ought to excite in the mind of a young 
student, if it is thrust upon him in a dry 
compend, which he must glue his un- 
willing eyes to, while remembering al- 
ways that the trigger of an examination 
trap may be lurking in every name, date, 
and circumstance that it holds. For His- 
tory, if for nothing else that the school 
gives him, I would ease him of that 
dread, and make him free to experience 
pleasure and desire. I would make him 
his own examiner, by requiring him, at 
intervals, to write a summary in his own 
language of what he has gathered from 
the last week or fortnight of the readings. 
There is no other process of durable 
memorizing that equals that ; and I be- 
lieve it could be trusted, in connection 
with such readings as I suggest, to yield 
better results than are coming from the 
catechized "study" of History now pur- 
sued in our schools. 



OF HISTORY 187 

I know the hazard of my venture in 
theorizing without practical experience, 
and I am prepared to have it shown to 
me that my suggestions are impracti- 
cable, or that, if practicable, they would 
not answer my expectations in the result. 
If experience so adjudges them, I only 
ask to be told why. 



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